Getting Started with Earnest

Welcome to Earnest — the focused commission calculator built for modern scaling teams. Whether you're an admin setting up your first compensation plan or a rep checking your earnings, this guide will get you oriented in under five minutes.

For Admins & RevOps

Step 1: Create Your Organization

When you sign up for Earnest, you'll create an organization — this is your company's workspace. Everything in Earnest — plans, teams, users, activities, and payouts — lives inside your organization and is completely isolated from other customers.

• Your organization has a base currency (e.g., USD, EUR, GBP) used for consolidated financial reporting.
• You can invite team members and assign them roles: Admin, Manager, or Rep.

Step 2: Build Your Teams & Titles

Teams are how you organize your sales force. Each team can have:

• Titles (e.g., "Junior AE," "Senior AE," "AM Growth") with default quotas and optional comp plan overrides.
• Seasonality weights — if your business has uneven quarterly demand, you can set custom weights (e.g., Q4 = 35%, Q1 = 15%) so quotas are distributed fairly.

Step 3: Create a Compensation Plan

This is the core of Earnest. A comp plan defines the rules for how commissions are calculated. Head to Admin → Plans and build your first plan. See Understanding Compensation Plans for a deep dive.

Step 4: Import Your Data

Earnest accepts two types of CSV imports:

1. Compensation data — bulk-load your team roster with names, emails, titles, quotas, OTE, and base salaries.
2. Activity data — import closed deals, bookings, meetings, or any trackable event with reference numbers, amounts, and dates.

See Data Imports & Validation for formatting rules and validation details.

Step 5: Run & Publish Payouts

Once your plan and data are in place, generate draft payouts, review the math, make adjustments, and publish. Published payouts automatically notify reps via email with a PDF commission statement attached.

See The Payout Pipeline for a full lifecycle walkthrough.

For Sales Reps

Your Dashboard

When you log in, your dashboard shows you everything you need at a glance:

• Quota attainment — how close you are to hitting target this period.
• Commission earned — your calculated earnings based on real activity data.
• Activities — every deal or event that's been tracked toward your quota.

Your dashboard is a live view — it recalculates in real time as new activities are imported or adjustments are made.

Commission Statements

When your admin publishes a payout, you'll receive an email with your Commission Statement attached as a PDF. This statement shows the full breakdown of how your payout was calculated — revenue, attainment, tier rates, bonuses, adjustments, and the final number.

See Reading Your Commission Statement for a section-by-section guide.

Disputes

If your organization has disputes enabled, you can flag a specific activity or payout for review. Your admin will see the dispute and can resolve it with an optional adjustment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many users can I add? Your plan determines your active user limit. The free tier supports up to 5 active users. Paid plans scale from there — check your billing settings for your current limit.

Q: Can I use Earnest for non-revenue metrics like meetings or demos? Yes! Earnest supports both Revenue (monetary) and Unit (count-based) metric types. Unit plans track quantities instead of monetary amounts — perfect for SDR teams or any role measured by activity count.

Q: Is my data secure? Every piece of data in Earnest is scoped to your organization. There is no cross-tenant data access. All sessions are authenticated, admin actions are authorization-checked, and sensitive operations are logged to an audit trail.

Q: What currencies does Earnest support? Earnest supports any ISO 4217 currency code. Each user can have a separate quota currency and payout currency, and your organization has a base currency for consolidated reporting. See Multi-Currency Explained for details.