Glossary

Short, plain-English definitions of the terms you'll see across Earnest's dashboards, statements, and admin screens. For deeper walkthroughs, follow the links into the full guides. If you are new to commission software generally, the product overview is a shorter starting point than this page.

Earning money

Commission

The variable pay you earn from your credited sales activity, calculated by your comp plan's rules: your metric total, measured against your quota, paid at your effective rate (with tiers applied). See Understanding Compensation Plans.

Earnings

Everything you earned for a period: commission plus any bonuses, draw top-ups, and adjustments. Your statement's "gross earnings" is this figure before currency conversion.

Payout

The period-level record of your earnings — the thing that gets generated as a draft, reviewed, published, and paid. One payout per person per period. Commission is how the number is computed; earnings are what you accrued; the payout is the record that pays it. See The Payout Pipeline.

Draft vs. published (finalized)

A draft payout is a live preview — it recalculates as data changes and is labeled "Draft — subject to change." A published (finalized) payout is frozen: its numbers are locked from a snapshot taken at publish time and never silently recalculated. Fixes to a published payout arrive as corrections or adjustments, not edits.

Correction

A change posted to fix a published payout. Because published payouts are frozen, the fix is recorded as its own entry in a later period rather than rewriting history. Corrections come in four kinds — true-up, clawback, amendment and dispute — depending on how they arose. See Corrections & Clawbacks.

Recompute correction

The accurate way to correct a paid period: you supply the corrected revenue figure and the engine replays it through that period's frozen plan snapshot, posting the exact commission difference forward. Because it's a differential through the same tier schedule, it stays correct through accelerators, caps and floors.

True-up

A correction that resolves to a positive amount — you were underpaid, and the difference is added to a later period. (Also used for the QTD quarterly true-up; see Evaluation period.)

Clawback

A correction that resolves to a negative amount. You are never asked to pay cash back: your payout is floored at zero and any unrecovered remainder becomes a recoverable balance.

Recoverable balance

An unrecovered overpayment carried forward from an earlier period. It nets against your future positive earnings until it's paid down, and it's shown on your payout in the app whenever it's active. See Corrections & Clawbacks.

Amendment

A manual correction an admin posts against a period that's already published. It rolls forward into your current open period, tagged with the period it corrects.

Adjustment

A manual amount added or deducted — a spiff, clawback, fixed bonus, or a revenue/unit correction. A revenue adjustment joins your volume and flows through the commission math (so it can change your attainment and tier); a fixed bonus is added flat at the end. Adjustments submitted by a manager need admin approval and expire after 14 days if unreviewed. See Review, Approvals & Disputes.

Dispute

A formal "I think this payout is wrong" filed from a published statement, within your org's dispute window (60 days by default). Admins review it and either resolve it (usually with a linked adjustment) or reject it, with a comment either way.

Acknowledgement

Confirming you've seen a published statement. It doesn't waive your right to dispute — it just records that the statement reached you.

Measuring performance

Quota

Your sales target for a period, in revenue, units, or a ratio goal. Your effective quota can be reduced by ramp (see below) or proration (joining mid-period).

Attainment

Your progress against quota, as a percentage: metric total ÷ effective quota. 120% attainment means you delivered 1.2× your target. See Navigating Your Dashboard.

Tier / accelerator

Comp plans pay in attainment bands: e.g. 1× up to 100% of quota, 1.5× from 100–150%, 2× beyond. The higher bands are accelerators — they pay a multiple of your normal rate on the revenue above each threshold. Tiers are marginal, like tax brackets: crossing a boundary only accelerates the revenue past it.

Rate multiplier

The number an accelerator tier multiplies your effective commission rate by (the "2×" in "the 2× tier").

Kicker / milestone bonus

A one-time lump-sum bonus attached to a tier threshold — e.g. "5% of your variable pay when you cross 100% attainment" — paid on top of tiered commission.

Ramp

Reduced quotas (and often a guaranteed draw) during your first months in a role, so you're not measured against a full target while onboarding. See Understanding Compensation Plans.

Draw

A guaranteed minimum payment. If your earned commission comes in below the guarantee (commonly during ramp), a draw top-up fills the gap, and your statement shows the split.

Plans and configuration

Plan mix

A team setting that splits every member's variable comp across more than one plan, each with a weight (e.g. 70% new business, 30% renewals) totalling 100%. One plan is the default, catching any activity that isn't tagged to a specific plan. Your dashboard and statement show a per-plan breakdown when your team's mix is active.

FTE / ratio metric

A plan type measured as currency per full-time-equivalent headcount (e.g. $100K/FTE). Your target is the goal × your team's FTE count, so the denominator matters as much as the numerator. The headcount is active-day-weighted across the reporting subtree, and an admin can override it for a period.

Payout frequency

How often a plan produces a payout — monthly or quarterly. It also sets how annual figures like quota and OTE are divided into periods.

Evaluation period / QTD

How often attainment is measured, which can differ from how often you're paid. In QTD mode you're paid monthly but measured across the quarter: each month totals the quarter so far, applies the tier schedule, deducts what was already paid, and pays the difference as a true-up. This stops one big month earning its accelerator again in the months after it.

Effective date

The date a configuration change starts applying. Comp config in Earnest is date-scoped: a plan change effective April 1 affects April's payouts and leaves March untouched.

Supersede

Replacing a configuration version from an effective date forward. The old version is kept for history (past periods still calculate against it) rather than overwritten. See Scheduled Changes & History.

Plan snapshot

The frozen copy of your plan's rules — tiers, cap, floor, ramp, resolved quota — stored on a payout when it's generated. It's why editing a plan never changes a paid period, and what a recompute correction replays against.

Draft sign-off

A manager's confirmation that a direct report's draft payout looks right. It's informational — it never blocks publishing — and it's cleared if the draft is regenerated. See The Manager's Guide.

Publish hold

A block that stops a draft being published because its inputs changed after it was generated — new activities, changed credit splits, a late-approved adjustment, or a deletion. The fix is to regenerate and publish the recomputed figures. See The Payout Pipeline.

Anomaly check

The pre-publish scan that flags unusual payouts — negative, zero for an active rep, a spike against the rep's trailing average, or a large swing against their last payout. It asks for acknowledgement rather than blocking.

As-of view

Viewing configuration as it stood on a given date — "what plan was this rep on, on March 15?" This is how published payouts stay explainable long after the config has moved on.

New to Earnest? Start with Getting Started. Managing a team? See The Manager's Guide. Currency questions? See Multi-Currency Explained.