Most commission plans don't fail because the idea is wrong. They fail because nobody modelled the numbers before rolling them out. A rate that looks generous on a slide turns into a payout you can't afford at 130% attainment, or an accelerator so flat that your best reps stop pushing the moment they hit quota.

So we built a free commission sheet template to fix that. It's one Excel file with eight ready-to-use sales commission spreadsheets, each structure on its own tab, each with live formulas and a filled-in sample row. Change a rate, a quota, or a revenue number and every payout updates instantly, and because everything lives in one workbook you can compare models side by side without juggling downloads.

Download the commission sheet template, or start for free and let Driven build the plan for you.

New to comp design? Start with our guide to sales compensation structure types, then model your pick here.

This is the structure most modern sales orgs land on. The commission rate climbs as a rep moves through bands of quota attainment. In the template we use three tiers: a base rate up to 100% of quota, a higher rate between 100% and 150%, and a top rate above 150%.

The important detail, and the one most templates get wrong, is that the tiers are marginal. Each dollar is paid at the rate for the band it falls into, not one blended rate applied to the whole total. A rep at 165% of a $100,000 quota earns the base rate on the first $100,000, the middle rate on the next $50,000, and the top rate only on the final $15,000. (Templates built on an approximate-match VLOOKUP quietly pay every dollar at a single tier's rate, which overpays or underpays reps who land mid-band.)

Formula (marginal):
Tier 1 pay = MIN(Revenue, Quota) × Rate 1
Tier 2 pay = MAX(0, MIN(Revenue, 1.5 × Quota) − Quota) × Rate 2
Tier 3 pay = MAX(0, Revenue − 1.5 × Quota) × Rate 3
Total = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Tier 3

When to use it: When you want reps to keep selling after they hit target. Accelerators are the single most effective lever for driving overperformance, because the marginal reward gets bigger exactly where you want more effort. The trade-off is cost predictability: model your top performers at their best month, not their average one, so an exceptional quarter doesn't blow the budget.

A draw is a guaranteed advance a rep receives each period, later recovered from the commission they earn. It exists to solve a real problem: commission-only income is brutal during ramp or in businesses with long, lumpy sales cycles.

The template models a recoverable draw. Each month the rep is advanced the draw amount. When their commission exceeds the draw, the excess first repays any outstanding balance, and the rest is paid out. When commission falls short, the shortfall is added to the balance they owe against future earnings.

Formula:
Commission earned = Revenue × Commission rate
Payout = Draw + MAX(0, Commission earned − Draw − Prior balance)
New balance owed = MAX(0, Prior balance + Draw − Commission earned)

When to use it: During onboarding, when launching a new territory, or in any role where it takes months to build a book of business. A recoverable draw protects the rep's income without permanently inflating your comp cost: the advance is paid back once they're producing. Be explicit in writing about whether a draw is recoverable or non-recoverable; it's one of the most common sources of comp disputes.

Instead of paying on revenue, you pay on profit: the gross margin left after the cost of the sale. At a 20% rate, a $90,000 deal that costs $54,000 to deliver produces $36,000 of margin and $7,200 of commission.

Formula:
Gross margin = Revenue − Cost (COGS)
Commission = Gross margin × Rate

When to use it: When protecting margin matters more than chasing top-line revenue: businesses with variable delivery costs, heavy discounting pressure, or products at different margin profiles. The elegant part is the incentive alignment: because pay follows profit, a rep who discounts to win a deal directly reduces their own commission. It asks more of your data, though; you need reliable cost figures per deal for it to work.

The five structures above set a rate at the plan level. This one sets it deal by deal: the commission percentage flexes based on the characteristics of the specific deal a rep closes. Not every deal is worth the same to the business, so not every deal pays the same rate.

In the template we model two of the most common modifiers, but the pattern extends to any deal attribute you can measure:

• Contract size: deals above a threshold you set earn a bonus on top of the base rate. Bigger, stickier contracts are worth more, so you pay more to land them.
• Deal source: inbound and outbound deals are adjusted differently. Because an outbound deal is one the rep sourced and built from scratch, it typically earns a higher rate than an inbound lead that arrived ready to buy.

Formula:
Effective rate = Base rate + Large-deal bonus (if contract size > threshold) + Source adjustment (inbound or outbound)
Commission = Deal value × Effective rate

For example, a $180,000 outbound deal on a large contract might combine a 5% base, a 2% large-deal bonus, and a 3% outbound adjustment for a 10% effective rate (an $18,000 payout), while a small inbound deal on the same plan sits at the 5% base.

When to use it: When a single flat rate would reward the wrong behaviour: paying the same for a hard-won outbound enterprise deal as for an inbound renewal that closed itself. Deal-level modifiers let you steer reps toward the deals that actually move the business. The caution is complexity: every modifier you add is one more rule a rep has to trust and one more thing to calculate correctly, so add them deliberately and keep the logic transparent.

With residual commissions, a rep earns an ongoing percentage of the recurring revenue from their accounts for as long as those customers keep paying. An $8,000-a-month account at a 5% residual rate pays the rep $400 every month it renews, or $4,800 across a year.

Formula:
Commission per period = Recurring revenue × Residual rate
Annualised commission = Commission per period × Periods per year

When to use it: SaaS, subscriptions, insurance, and any model built on renewals rather than one-off sales. Residual pay rewards reps for landing customers who stay, not just customers who sign, which aligns the sales team with retention and lifetime value. The watch-out is motivation drift: if a rep's book of residuals grows large enough, chasing new logos can start to feel optional, so most teams pair residuals with a new-business component.

Territory volume rewards the total sales generated within a region, then splits the payout across the reps who cover it. A territory that sells $1,725,000 at a 4% rate produces $69,000 in commission; shared across three reps, that's $23,000 each.

Formula:
Territory commission = Actual territory sales × Commission rate
Commission per rep = Territory commission ÷ Number of reps in the territory

When to use it: When you're driving market penetration in specific regions and want a whole team pulling in the same direction rather than competing over accounts. It rewards coverage and collaboration. The trade-off is that individual effort gets diluted: a standout rep earns the same share as a coasting teammate, so it works best alongside an individual metric, or in genuinely team-sold markets.

Open the file and start on the "Start Here" tab, then pick the commission sheet that matches your plan. Every tab follows the same rule: edit only the shaded cells (blue text on a yellow fill are your inputs: rates, quotas, revenue) and leave everything in black alone, because those are live formulas that recalculate as you type. Each spreadsheet includes a worked sample row so you can see the expected format before you replace it with your own reps.

Model a few scenarios before you commit. Run your top performer at a blowout number and your ramping reps at a slow start. The point of modelling on a spreadsheet is to find the plan's failure modes here, where they cost nothing, instead of on a payout run. If you want benchmarks to sanity-check your rates, our sales compensation statistics guide is a good place to start, and our walkthrough on how to build a sales compensation plan covers the decisions around the numbers.

A template like this is perfect for designing and pressure-testing a plan. It's less fun once the plan is live: when you're maintaining formulas across dozens of reps, reconciling CRM data by hand every month, fielding "why is my number wrong?" questions, and rebuilding the whole thing the moment leadership tweaks the quota. Most template packs end here, with a line about how spreadsheets don't scale. They're right. They just leave you to figure out the rest.

That's the problem Driven was built for. Instead of maintaining commission spreadsheets by hand, an AI agent designs your comp plan, calculates every payout in real time against your CRM data, and gives each rep a live dashboard of what they've earned and what's next. The agent models and recommends; you stay in control of the final call. No more month-end reconciliation, no more shadow accounting, no more version 14 of the spreadsheet.

Start with the template. When you're ready to stop maintaining it by hand, start for free or book a demo, and we'll show you what running the same plan on autopilot looks like.