Corrections & Clawbacks
A published payout is immutable — the rep has been notified and the number is frozen. So Earnest never edits a paid period. Instead it posts a correcting entry forward into an open period, with a structured link back to the period being corrected.
This article covers the three ways a correction gets created, what happens when the correction is negative, and how to read a recoverable balance.
The corrections ledger
Every correcting entry records what it corrects and why:
| Kind | Created by |
|---|---|
| True-up | A recompute correction that resolves to a positive delta. |
| Clawback | A recompute correction that resolves to a negative delta. |
| Amendment | An admin posting a manual adjustment against a period that is already published. |
| Dispute | An admin resolving a rep-filed dispute with an adjustment attached. |
All four post forward into the rep's first open period (or a period you pick), while pointing back at the published period they correct. The paid period itself is never modified. Both the admin payout view and the rep's statement show the lineage, so a correction is always traceable to its origin.
Recompute corrections — the accurate way to fix a number
If the underlying revenue for a published period turns out to have been wrong, do not hand-compute a bonus. Use a recompute correction.
You supply the revenue delta — how much the period's total should move. Earnest then:
- Loads the period's frozen plan snapshot — its actual tiers, cap, floor, base rate multiplier, proration factor and resolved quota.
- Computes the commission at the original revenue and at the corrected revenue, using that snapshot.
- Posts the difference forward as an approved fixed-bonus entry.
Because the result is a differential through the same schedule, it is exact through accelerators, caps and floors. A flat percentage of the revenue delta is only correct when the rep sits entirely in a single 1.0× tier — which is exactly when it matters least.
A preview shows you the resulting commission delta before you commit. The revenue delta is bounded to ±1,000,000, the same bound every other money input in Earnest carries.
Worked example
A rep on a plan with a 1.0× tier to quota and a 2.0× accelerator above it is published at 100,000 revenue against a 100,000 quota, at a 10% rate — 10,000 commission. A late deal means the period should have been 120,000.
- Commission at 120,000 = 10,000 + (20,000 × 10% × 2.0) = 14,000
- Commission at 100,000 = 10,000
- Correction posted forward = 4,000
A flat 10% of the 20,000 delta would have posted 2,000 — half the correct amount, because it ignores the accelerator the rep actually earned.
When a recompute correction is refused
Some periods cannot be replayed exactly. Earnest refuses rather than posting an approximate number, and tells you to post a one-off adjustment for the delta instead:
| Refusal | Why |
|---|---|
| The payout predates faithful snapshots | There is no resolved block to replay against. |
| The quarter spanned multiple plan versions | A segmented QTD quarter was priced per-segment, each with its own tiers and cap; a single-version replay cannot reproduce it. |
| The payout came from a multi-plan mix | The top-level snapshot has no tiers of its own — they live inside each slice — so replaying it would use an empty schedule against the wrong quota. |
| The period was a flat-rate ramp month | A ramp step with the tier schedule disabled was paid at a flat 1× with no milestone bonuses. Replaying through the raw tiers would price accelerators and bonuses the rep was never eligible for, and the error does not cancel in the differential. |
| The schedule was disabled somewhere in the quarter | Same cause, reaching a QTD quarter that ramped in an earlier month. |
In those cases the older guidance still applies: work out the delta and post it as a manual adjustment, with the reasoning in the reason field.
Only a published payout can be recomputed. For a draft, just edit the underlying data and regenerate.
Where the money lands
The delta is computed in the rep's quota currency and stamped in that currency, then converted to their payout currency at generation time like any other fixed-bonus entry.
The correction posts into the rep's first open period by default; you can pick a different one, but it must be open — a period that already has a published payout is rejected with "The target period already has a published payout. Choose an open period."
Submitting the same correction twice (a double-click, a retried request) is suppressed rather than double-paid, as long as the first one has not yet been disbursed.
Amendments — a manual correction to a closed period
If you add an adjustment to a rep for a month whose payout is already published, Earnest automatically converts it into an amendment: it rolls the entry forward into the rep's current open period and tags it with the period it corrects. The reason is prefixed with the origin period so the lineage is visible.
You cannot amend the current or a future period this way — if the target month is not in the past, Earnest returns "Cannot add adjustments to a published payout in the current/future period." Adjust the open period directly instead.
Clawbacks and recoverable balances
Sometimes a correction is negative — a deal was reversed, or a period was overpaid.
A rep is never asked to pay cash back. The disbursed payout is floored at zero. If a period nets out negative, the shortfall becomes a recoverable balance that carries forward, and future positive earnings net against it until it is paid down.
What a rep sees
On the payout where a balance is active, the rep sees a notice on their payout detail page telling them how much of a prior overpayment was recovered from this period, and how much remains — along with the reassurance that they are never charged cash back. When the balance reaches zero the notice says the balance is fully paid down.
How the numbers relate
The balance is tracked in the rep's payout currency. Because gross earnings are stored signed
while the disbursement is floored at zero, on a clawback period final payout deliberately does not
equal gross earnings + fixed bonus — the difference is the amount forgiven to the floor and
carried forward instead.
QTD plans
If a rep is on a monthly-payout, quarterly-evaluation (QTD) plan, an intra-quarter clawback neither grows nor reduces their recoverable balance — the quarterly true-up already handles forgiveness inside the quarter, and letting the balance absorb it too would forgive the same money twice. A balance carried in from a prior quarter is still netted normally.
Regenerating a period in a balance chain
Because each period reads the previous period's closing balance, regenerating out of order would break the chain. Earnest skips such a period with a warning and asks you to delete the later periods and regenerate forward from the one you changed.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Should I ever use a plain Fixed Bonus to correct a published period? Only when a recompute correction is refused for one of the reasons above. Otherwise the recompute is strictly more accurate — it prices the change through the rep's real schedule instead of your arithmetic.
Q: The preview says the delta is zero. Why? The corrected and original revenue price to the same commission — usually because both sit inside a flat region such as a cap or floor. Nothing is written when the delta is zero.
Q: Does a correction affect the rep's attainment for the corrected period? No. The published period keeps its attainment. The correction is a cash delta posted into a later period; it does not retroactively change history.
Q: Do dispute resolutions go through the approval queue? No. An adjustment created by resolving a dispute is approved immediately and is payable at the next generation. See Review, Approvals & Disputes.
Q: Can I correct a period from before my dispute window? Admin-initiated corrections ignore the dispute lookback window entirely. That window only limits how far back a rep can file a dispute.