A finance portal that replaced a spreadsheet from 2017
Five manual processes — payroll, vendor invoices, commission holds, exemption certificates, sales-tax thresholds — all running through one co-owner, consolidated into one application his team operates.
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Payroll calculated by hand every Thursday in a spreadsheet built in 2017
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Payments entered one at a time in a bank portal, notifications written by hand
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Manufacturer invoices tracked as saved emails in an Outlook folder
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Commission holds and clawbacks calculated manually, with no way to audit them
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If the owner was unavailable on a Thursday, payroll did not happen
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The Thursday payroll hour returned to the business every week
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Two trained backup operators, so payroll no longer depends on one person
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An auditable commission history for every rep, recalculated when profit changes
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An alert when a vendor payment comes due before the customer has paid
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Roughly 18 hours of December compliance work reduced to review and signing
Discovery started by watching the work, not asking about it. One co-owner spent an hour every Thursday, under constant interruption, computing commissions from CRM data in a spreadsheet nobody else fully understood. The logic was genuinely hard: individual rates, a payout cap, deposit-coverage holds, split deals, cancellation clawbacks that cascade into bonus clawbacks, and a delivery commission pool.
He said plainly that he could not be certain every weekly calculation had been correct. There was no systematic way to check.
Four adjacent problems shared the root cause: manufacturer invoices managed in an inbox, high-value open balances tracked by memory, exemption certificates re-typed by hand each December, and sales-tax thresholds reviewed once a year — which meant a single large sale could cross a threshold nine months before anyone noticed.
Three architectures were evaluated in writing before a line of code. Building inside the CRM meant fighting its automation limits with every commission rule, on a payment integration unproven at twenty-plus payees. A standalone app meant bypassing the accounting system already used for P&L and 1099s.
We chose the middle path: the CRM stays a read-only source of truth, a purpose-built portal holds calculation and approval, the accounting platform executes payment and keeps the ledger. Before committing we confirmed its API could create bills and trigger transfers at that volume, and documented a contingency path in case it couldn't.
The architecture document was signed before the build began. It named what we chose, what we rejected, and what we would do if the chosen path failed.
Payroll automation
Pulls the pay period's closed deals, applies every commission rule, and presents a report for review. Nothing moves until an owner approves it — then the portal creates the bills and triggers the transfers.
Vendor payment queue
Invoices arrive at a dedicated address and are parsed and matched to their deal. The queue is color-coded by urgency and flags any building where the vendor is owed before the customer has paid.
Holds and clawback ledger
A running record of every held amount by rep and deal. When a deal cancels, both the commission and the proportional bonus clawback are calculated and surfaced for review before any deduction.
Certificate preparation
An AI-assisted workflow that finds the current official form for each state and vendor, flags where it differs from the saved copy, pre-fills it, and produces a PDF ready to review and sign.
Threshold monitoring
Net sales and transaction counts tracked by state against each state's registration thresholds, with an alert at 70% and a status report each December. It surfaces the data; the registration decision stays with the business and its advisors.
Delivered with owner training for three operators, a payroll runbook for the backups, and an admin interface so rates, bonus schedules, and thresholds can be changed without a developer.