Best Practices for Managing Comp Exceptions

Why are exceptions so hard? By definition, they’re unpredictable. You don’t know how many will come up in a given cycle, or what shape they’ll take. But they’re also a necessary (and healthy) part of running an agile sales org.

For example: if it makes sense for multiple sellers to collaborate on an account, your incentives need to support teamwork. That often means creating a split or another exception so the outcome matches how the business actually operates.

When you’re managing exceptions, two challenges show up again and again:

1. Keeping track If you’re doing this in Excel, you need a clean, consistent way to log every exception. I recommend maintaining a dedicated tab that includes:

• the type/nature of the exception
• the date it was created
• who it impacts
• who approved it
• a record of the approval itself

Without that, exceptions become tribal knowledge—and that’s risky.

1. Executing them Because exceptions vary so widely, implementing them in Excel (or even in some comp systems) can get messy fast. You end up “hardcoding” one-off formulas or adding special rules directly into the model.

And that usually works… until it doesn’t. Hardcoded logic is easy to forget, hard to audit, and almost guaranteed to create headaches later.

Best practices we leverage at EasyComp

1) Classify your exceptions In practice, most exceptions fall into a handful of repeatable buckets. The key is to label the exception clearly the moment it comes in. At EasyComp, we group them into categories like:

• Splits: Deals where multiple people split (or double-count) commission
• Source adjustments: Updating a CRM field only for commissions purposes, without changing the CRM itself
• Ledger adjustments: Overriding payout for an individual deal versus what the plan says
• Holdovers: Creating a future adjustment tied to a condition (e.g., “If the deal closes by Jan 1, Mike gets credit; otherwise Ann does.”)

2) Track both exceptions and approvals Sooner or later, an auditor will ask why commissions don’t match the comp plan. When that happens, you want a simple way to show:

• what exception was applied
• why it was applied
• who approved it
• and when

At EasyComp, we make exceptions easy to log and automatically link approvals to the deal for a clean audit trail.

3) Standardize implementation by category If you’re working in Excel, the best move is to build a separate tab for each exception type, with dedicated formulas to handle that logic. It’s doable—but can get complicated quickly.

At EasyComp, exception tracking and execution are built directly into the admin UI, so applying them is consistent, fast, and dependable.

Exceptions are one of the hardest parts of comp plan management. At EasyComp, we’re building technology to make them intuitive—so they’re executed flawlessly, tracked automatically, and never become a source of stress during audits.

If you want to learn more, let’s talk.

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By Jose Fernandez

About the Author

‍Jose Fernandez is part of the team behind EasyComp.ai, building infrastructure that helps companies run sales compensation without spreadsheets, confusion, or delays. He believes incentive systems should be easy to operate—and crystal clear to the people who earn them.

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