Question: I have sales reps that I pay based on gross profit. Can I do these reports in QuickBooks?
Answer: Unfortunately, no, QuickBooks does not calculate gross profit by sales rep for non-inventory items, which is 98 percent of our industry.
I am working on a solution to this problem for some of my clients, and would appreciate your letting me know if this solution might be of interest to you.
Until then, here are a couple of current workarounds:
If you have but a couple sales reps, QuickBooks does produce a report of gross sales by sales rep, but it calculates correctly only when the income received and the expenses paid occur in the same time period, which is not always the case. I have clients who keep a spreadsheet of sales and cost of goods sold by rep to manually calculate the commissions.
For larger distributors, there is QCommission.com, a data integration software, that integrates with QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise, and calculates commissions based on Gross Sales or Gross Profit. It has various options for producing commission reports. It also allows for certain line items, such as freight, to be included or excluded in the calculations.
If you are struggling with this issue, you might want to contact QCommission to see if they can produce the report.
Please email your questions to Harriet at Ask The Accountant.
QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise can be modified to better serve ad specialty distributors. Harriet Gatter is a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, a former accounting professor and a former ad specialty distributor. She advises ad specialty distributors to use QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise, often in conjunction with other industry-specific software, to manage the complexities of the ad specialty business, with the results being time saved, errors eliminated and an overall accurate accounting of your business. Contact her at [email protected].
