How to Create an Approval Workflow for Sales Compensation

by Core Commissions | Jun 5, 2025

There are many moving pieces involved in processing commissions and having an extra pair of eyes on the sales data you use to calculate payments will save you from having to deal with correcting payouts.

As your business continues to grow and expand, commission management will inevitably become more and more time-consuming, especially if you don’t make a conscious effort to streamline your commission processes. To prevent overburdening your compensation administrator, it helps to make the process a team effort, making it easier for your compensation plan to scale with you.

While this helps take some of the burden off your administrative team, it also helps encourage your sales team to become part of the process by implementing an approval workflow. This helps to increase accuracy and promote transparency among your sales reps so that there are no surprises from your team when payday comes.

Define the Review and Approval Stages:

When creating an approval workflow, you need to determine who needs to be involved in the approval and in what order.

An example of this process might look like:

Step 1: Sales Rep Review: Each rep reviews their own commission statement or earnings report, they confirm accuracy and flag any discrepancies.

Step 2: Manager Approval: Sales managers review and confirm their team’s statements. Any discrepancies noted by sales reps in step one are addressed or escalated for correction.

Step 3: Administrator Processing: Once both approvals are received, the compensation admin can lock the commission cycle and proceed with processing payments. If errors are discovered by the admin during processing, they will then request additional approval or information from the manager and/or sales rep.

Establishing an Approval Timeline

When establishing an approval timeline, you want to find the sweet spot between giving your reps too much time that they end up forgetting to submit their approvals and too little time where reps feel rushed to verify their statements. In general, a 1-week approval cycle is appropriate, but this will depend on your organization and your specific processing schedule. If your commissions are processed weekly, you might need to expedite the approval process.

Below is an example of what a potential approval cycle might look like:

Day 1: Commission statements are distributed to reps.
Day 4: Reps must submit approvals to managers or provide details on any potential disputes.
Day 6: Managers complete their review and submit payment amounts to administrators.
Day 7: Admin locks commission cycle and begins processing payments.

You want each level of the approval workflow to have at least two to three days to review and confirm pay details. Your reps are busy making sales and if they have to double-check something in their statements, it may take a couple of days to verify the sale details.

An approval workflow is the idea of “slow down to speed up” in practice. You will need to account for an extra week of processing when determining your comp payout schedule, but you will ultimately save time by ensuring that you are starting with absolutely accurate data.

Manage Your Approval Workflow with Core

By utilizing an approval workflow, you can ensure the data that you start with is more accurate than ever, but this does add extra steps to your commission management checklist. To truly streamline these additional processes, you need a tool that allows you to automate these steps.

The beginning of every step in the examples outlined above, starts with a notification. A rep getting notified that their statement is ready to view, or a manager being alerted that a rep has submitted their sales for review – as small as these tasks seem, they add up quickly when your team has to manually send an email each time they need to progress the approval process.

With Core, you can completely automate your approval workflow. Our implementation team can customize a workflow specific to your business and your processing schedule, so all your team needs to focus on is looking at their sales totals and confirming that they are correct.

For added transparency, your team members can track the status of their commission payments to see where they are in the approval process.

Handling Compensation Disputes

With an approval workflow for sales compensation data, you will greatly reduce the amount of payment disputes from your sales reps. However, even with an effective workflow, there will still be occasional disputes. Prepare yourself for disputes by building that into your workflow.

Core’s intuitive dispute management features allow you to easily add this to your approval workflow. Simply identify the chain of command on who should be notified of the issue and who is responsible for resolution of the dispute. Having a formal process for handling disputes helps create a sense of trust among your employees, so they feel that their concerns are heard and appropriate attention is being placed on potential problems with their paycheck.

While the Core platform makes it easy to track and document disputes, you need to make sure that you are resolving their issues in a timely manner to truly embed trust in your employees. Similar to the timeline for the approval workflow, set an expectation for when your employees can expect to hear back about their issues.

For example, create an automated notification in your workflow that informs the submitter that their dispute has been received and someone will get back to them within two business days with a resolution.

Getting Everybody on Board

If an approval workflow is new for your employees, it’s important to highlight the benefits with your team and how the ultimate goal is to improve accuracy and increase transparency. To be effective, the approval workflow requires participation from everyone, so you need to make it clear that this is not optional.

In order to make the transition seamless, make sure that your workflow, including pertinent deadlines, are readily available to your entire team. This can all be added to your team’s dashboard in Core’s online employee portal, allowing your reps to be apprised of key dates in your commission cycle and when they will be expected to review and approve their sales compensation by.

Implementing an Approval Workflow with Core

When it comes to managing sales compensation, accuracy is everything, but even the most carefully calculated commission payment can lead to disputes if your team isn’t looped in before payments go out the door. One way to improve trust, prevent errors, and promote transparency is by implementing an approval workflow that requires both sales reps and their managers to review and sign off on compensation amounts before the compensation administrator processes final payments.

Adding an approval workflow may feel like an extra step, but it is a necessary means to streamline commission management. By putting accountability in the hands of those closest to the numbers – sales reps and their managers – you’re building a compensation process that’s transparent, fair, and built to scale.

Core’s solution gives you the flexibility to create a workflow customized to your business. Whether you are implementing a workflow for approving sales data before processing or handling pay disputes after the fact, Core provides automation to these workflows to seamlessly integrate with your business operations.