The Manager's Guide
If you manage people in Earnest, your dashboard does more than a rep's. You still see your own numbers, and alongside them you get a view of your team, the ability to submit adjustments for review, and a sign-off step on your reports' draft payouts before payroll finalizes them.
Managers do not have admin rights. You cannot publish payouts, edit plans, or approve your own adjustments — those are deliberately separated.
Your tabs
| Tab | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Team Overview | Your reports' attainment and earnings for the selected period, sortable. |
| Planner | Model earnings at any attainment — for yourself or a report. |
| My Payouts | Your own payouts and statements. |
| Team Payouts | Your reports' payouts, and the draft sign-off. |
| Adjustments | Submit an adjustment for a report, and track its status. |
| Team Disputes | Disputes filed by your reports. Only present when disputes are enabled. |
| Team Activities | The deals and events credited to your team. |
| Export | Download a CSV of your team's performance for the period. |
Every tab is scoped to the month you pick at the top.
What "your team" means
Your view is scoped by the reporting relationship as it existed during each period — not as it stands today.
If a rep joined your team in November, you see their figures from November onward, not their earlier year. If a rep transferred away in April, you keep their January–April numbers and nothing after. This applies consistently across payouts, activities, adjustments and the planner, so a period you did not manage never shows you a real pay figure.
Team Overview
Attainment and earnings for each report in the selected period. Sort by any column to find who is behind, who is running hot, and where commission is concentrating.
Click through to a rep's detail for their activity list and commission breakdown.
Your team's upcoming changes also surface here — a quota change, plan change or position change scheduled to take effect is visible before it lands, rather than arriving as a surprise in someone's statement. See Scheduled Changes & History.
Team Payouts and the draft sign-off
When admins generate drafts for a period, your reports' drafts appear here with a Mark reviewed button.
This is your check that the numbers look right before payroll finalizes them. It is:
- Draft-only — a published payout can no longer be signed off.
- Idempotent — marking twice does nothing the second time.
- Informational — it never blocks publishing. Admins can publish whether or not you have signed off; the record simply shows that you did.
- Cleared by regeneration — if the draft is recomputed, your sign-off is removed, because the numbers you approved no longer exist. Review the new figures and sign off again.
If a draft looks wrong, this is the moment to say so — once published it is frozen, and fixing it means posting a correction into a later period.
Submitting adjustments
Use the Adjustments tab to propose a spiff, a correction or a clawback for a direct report.
| Type | Effect |
|---|---|
| Revenue Adjustment | Added to the rep's revenue before commission is calculated — it moves attainment and can cross a tier threshold. |
| Fixed Bonus | A flat amount added to the final payout. |
Your adjustments do not take effect until an admin approves them. They are created as Pending and are excluded from every calculation until reviewed.
Pending adjustments expire after 14 days. If nobody reviews it in that window it is automatically closed, and expiry is one-way — it cannot be approved afterwards. If something you submitted expired, submit it again and chase the approval.
The tab shows the status of everything you have submitted, so you can see what is still waiting. Full detail in Review, Approvals & Disputes.
Disputes on behalf of a report
When disputes are enabled, you can file one for a direct report — useful when a rep flags something to you rather than filing themselves.
The same rules apply as for a rep filing directly: the payout must be published, it must fall inside the org's dispute window (60 days by default), and there can only be one active dispute per payout. The Team Disputes tab tracks what you have filed and how admins resolved it.
Planner
The Planner models earnings at any attainment level — yours, or a report's. Use it in a one-to-one to answer "what does hitting 120% actually pay me?" without anyone doing spreadsheet arithmetic.
For a report, the same tenure scoping applies: elapsed periods you did not manage them for are projected rather than showing their real pay. See The Earnings Planner.
Export
Download a CSV of your team's performance for the selected month — attainment, revenue or units, and commission. Amounts are labelled with their currency so a mixed-currency team is never ambiguous.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Can I publish my team's payouts? No. Publishing is an admin action. Your role is the review step before it.
Q: Can I approve my own submitted adjustment? No — submission and approval are deliberately separated. An admin reviews it.
Q: I marked a draft reviewed and now it says unreviewed. The draft was regenerated, which clears sign-offs. The figures changed, so the review needs to be redone against the new numbers.
Q: Why can't I see a rep's payouts from earlier in the year? Because you did not manage them then. The view is scoped to your actual tenure with each person.
Q: A report says their statement is wrong. What should I do? If the period is still a draft, raise it with your admin before publishing — that is the cheap fix. If it is already published, file a dispute (or have the rep file one) and the admin will resolve it with a correction.
Q: I'm a manager but I also carry a quota. Where are my own numbers? The My Payouts tab, and the Planner defaults to you. Manager quotas can be fixed or a rollup of your reports' quotas, depending on how your title is configured.