Getting Started with Earnest
Earnest is a commission engine for teams that have outgrown spreadsheets. Whether you are setting up your first comp plan or checking what you earned last month, this page points you at the right guide.
Pick your track: Admin · Manager · Rep
For admins & RevOps
1. Create your organization
Signing up creates your organization — your company's workspace. Everything lives inside it and is fully isolated from other customers.
- Set a base currency for consolidated reporting.
- Invite people as Admin, Manager or Rep.
2. Build teams and titles
Teams organize your sales force. Each team has:
- Titles (e.g. "Junior AE", "Senior AE") with default quotas and optional plan overrides.
- Seasonality weights if demand is uneven across quarters — e.g. Q4 35%, Q1 15% — so quotas distribute realistically.
Get the reporting hierarchy right while you are here. Manager rollup quotas and ratio plans both derive from who reports to whom.
3. Create a compensation plan
The core of Earnest. Under Admin → Organization → Plans, define your metric type, rate, tiers, ramp and any cap or floor. A team can also split variable comp across several plans by weight.
Read Understanding Compensation Plans before your first one — the tier, ramp and metric-type choices are the ones worth getting right up front.
Plan edits are effective-dated: changing a plan schedules a new version forward and never rewrites a period that has already been paid. See Scheduled Changes & History.
4. Import your data
Two ways in — CSV upload, or a REST API for warehouse and CRM pipelines. Import people first, then activities.
See Data Imports & Validation for exact column names, limits and validation rules.
5. Run payouts
Generate drafts, review them, regenerate if the data moves, then publish. Publishing freezes the numbers and notifies reps with a PDF statement.
See The Payout Pipeline.
6. Know where the rest lives
| You want to | Go to |
|---|---|
| Approve adjustments, resolve disputes | Review — Review, approvals and disputes |
| Fix a period that is already published | Payout detail — Corrections and clawbacks |
| See what a plan change would cost | Insights → Plan Simulator — Modeling and optimizing plans |
| See what your plans are costing now | Insights → Analytics — Analytics and the audit log |
| See what is scheduled to change | Organization → Scheduled Changes — Scheduled changes and history |
| Turn features on, manage email, export data | Settings — Admin settings and notifications |
For managers
Your dashboard shows your own numbers and your team's. You can:
- Review your reports' draft payouts and sign off before payroll finalizes them.
- Submit adjustments for approval — they take effect once an admin approves.
- File disputes on behalf of a report.
- Model earnings for yourself or a report.
- Export your team's performance.
You cannot publish payouts, edit plans, or approve your own adjustments — those stay with admins.
Start with The Manager's Guide.
For sales reps
Your dashboard
Quota attainment, commission earned, and every activity credited to you — recalculated live as data arrives. See Navigating Your Dashboard.
Your statements
When a payout is published you get an email with your Commission Statement PDF, showing the full math: revenue, attainment, tier rates, bonuses, adjustments and the final number. You can acknowledge it to confirm you have reviewed it — which never waives your right to dispute.
See Reading Your Commission Statement.
Planning ahead
The Earnings Planner models what you would earn at any attainment level, or what a specific deal is worth to you right now — using the real commission engine, not an estimate.
If something looks wrong
If disputes are enabled you can flag a published payout for review within your organization's dispute window. Otherwise, talk to your admin — they can correct any period.
Frequently asked questions
Q: How many users can I add? Starter is free for up to 5 active users; Teams ($149/mo) covers 6–19, Growth ($299/mo) 20–50, and Enterprise ($799/mo) 51+. Every feature is included on every plan — pricing is by user count, not by feature.
Q: Can I use Earnest for non-revenue metrics? Yes. Three metric types are supported: Revenue (money), Unit (counts, e.g. meetings or demos — ideal for SDR teams), and Ratio (a total per head, e.g. $100K per FTE — for manager and team scopes). See Understanding Compensation Plans.
Q: What currencies are supported? Any ISO 4217 currency. Each person can have separate quota and payout currencies, and your organization has a base currency for reporting. See Multi-Currency Explained.
Q: Is my data secure? Every record is scoped to your organization and enforced at the database level, not just in application code — there is no cross-tenant access. Sessions are authenticated, admin actions are authorization-checked, and sensitive operations are recorded to an audit trail.
Q: Can I get my data out? Yes — a full ZIP export of every table under Settings → Data, plus per-user exports for subject access requests. See Settings, Notifications & Your Data.
Q: What happens if I make a mistake on a published payout? Published payouts are immutable, but they are correctable. A recompute correction replays the corrected figure through that period's frozen plan snapshot and posts the exact difference forward. See Corrections & Clawbacks.
Q: New here and not sure what a word means? The Glossary defines every term Earnest uses, in plain English. For what it costs beyond the free tier, see pricing.