Three years after ChatGPT burst onto the scene, tedious, error-prone manual workflows are supposed to be a thing of the past. Yet new research shows that companies still spend an average of 89 hours a month managing incentive compensation.

That figure, from the 2025 State of Incentive Compensation Management Report, represents a structural drag on modern revenue teams and a growing opportunity cost for businesses.

The study, which captured insights from more than 200 incentive compensation pros at mid- to large-sized corporations, identified core compensation behaviors and key industry trends.

So why are half of all companies still relying on manual spreadsheets?

Part of it is because tools for sales performance, payroll, finance, and HR don’t play nicely together. You can’t use AI to automate workflows when the underlying systems aren’t compatible Often, changes to data in one system aren’t reflected in others, which leaves AI to hallucinate answers.

Since nothing is consistent, RevOps pros are left fiddling with pivot tables in manual spreadsheets to make the numbers make sense. Those wasted 89 hours a month represent time revenue leaders could be using to analyze sales performance, improve incentive plans, and shape the organization’s revenue strategy.

Where Those 89 Hours of Manual Work Go

Commission payouts look deceptively simple. But the 89 hours it takes to get there are spread across many manual actions that accumulate over the course of a month.

Taken together, this is how commission management consumes more than two work weeks a month, over 1,000 hours a year, and nearly half of a full-time role, just to arrive at a single number on a pay stub.

Establishing a Single Version of the Truth

Managing commissions starts by answering the question “What actually happened last month with sales?” 

The problem is that RevOps teams often find a different answer depending on which system they are looking at. 

The sales CMS may disagree with the billing system when each system has different ways of defining deals, or when there are edge cases. For example, a deal might show up in Salesforce as closed on the 31st, but not show up in NetSuite until the 1st.

To get around this, managers have to export data, trace deal IDs across systems, and resolve those discrepancies line by line.

Spreadsheet Maintenance

With no single system designed to hold all the data, RevOps teams fall back on spreadsheets. They put the data from each of the systems into different tabs, and then create formulas in those spreadsheets to manually apply different incentives. For example, they might have separate tabs for calculating base commissions, accelerators, and SPIFFs.

All of these tabs need to be updated every time new roles are introduced or territories shift. As comp plans evolve, those spreadsheets get more complex, which means the calculations also break more easily. That’s how spreadsheet maintenance gets added to commission managers’ job descriptions.

Cross-Checking and Approval Cycles

Before anything reaches payroll, RevOps teams need to validate the results. They check actuals against forecasts and compare their numbers to prior months to make sure the figures make sense.

Payouts then move through approval workflows. Managers review statements, then pass the numbers off to finance for sign-off. Every clarifying question along the way ripples backward to the RevOps team, who have to go back and double-check their numbers. If they have to make even a small revision, the whole approval process restarts from scratch.

Dispute Cleanup

Once statements go out, questions from sellers come flowing back in. It’s understandable. Many incentive structures are opaque, and they change often. Plus, according to our research, almost half of participants say they have both overpaid and underpaid on commissions in the past year. So, mistakes do happen.

Those questions from sellers force commission managers to pull deal records, reference comp plans again, and walk through the math step by step. Every time this happens, sellers become more distrustful of the process.

Why This Number Matters for the Business

Commission administration absorbs so much time that revenue teams have to sacrifice work somewhere.

Usually, the first casualty is analysis. 

Say your revenue team implemented a new accelerator in your comp plan with a goal of pulling deals forward. Revenue leaders would much rather dig into the data to decide whether it worked. But the team is too busy validating what happened to examine why it happened.

If the incentive is working, you should expand it and reap the gains. If it isn’t having any effect, then you should stop wasting money. Too bad you’re flying blind, and the easiest option is often not to iterate on the plan at all.

The same pattern plays out in forecasting. 

Let’s stick with our example of the new accelerator. Finance might freak out when commissions come in higher than expected and ask RevOps to explain the variance. The team sees that the problem is the old forecasting model still reflects pre-accelerator assumptions. Unfortunately, rebuilding that model would take them hours they don’t have because payroll is due tomorrow. 

And overall data quality deteriorates when revenue teams are overwhelmed by admin. They get used to handling discrepancies with manual overrides and other one-off fixes to make the payout math work for this month. That keeps things moving, but it doesn’t fix any underlying problems with the system. Tweaking the number in Excel doesn’t fill the empty data field in Salesforce.

There’s a human cost to all this as well. Commission administration is high-stakes, deadline-driven work. When it consumes too much of the revenue team’s time, it can lead to low morale and high burnout.

What Those 89 Hours Could Produce Instead

So, what could your team do with an extra 89 hours each month?

In just one month, you might give your analysts the breathing room they need to step back and examine seller performance. They might examine why a region consistently misses quota, or why certain deal cycles are trending longer each quarter. They can identify risks to their sales forecasts and address them earlier. They can take a look at how their incentive strategy is shaping seller behavior. 

Across an entire quarter, those hours could be spent redesigning that incentive strategy to better meet the company’s long-term goals. 

That extra time benefits your company in smaller ways, too. When RevOps leaders regain time in their schedules, they can spend that time onboarding new sellers so they understand the incentive structure and how to maximize their earnings. Leaders can put together clearer documentation that answers common payout questions, saving RevOps time and building trust with the sales team.

Ultimately, all that reclaimed time gives RevOps the chance to think instead of simply reacting to the next emergency. That way, they can better fulfill their promise to use incentive compensation as a lever for company growth.

Reclaiming Time Is a Strategic Advantage, Not an Efficiency Project

The teams that reclaim those lost hours compound their competitive advantage. Month after month, they free up time that can now be spent on strategic planning, innovation, and accurate forecasting.

Moving even a portion of those 89 hours from administration to strategy leads to better decisions and better revenue intelligence.

Additional research on incentive compensation and revenue operations is available via CaptivateIQ’s resource page.