How Schweiger Dermatology Group automated their commissions process to support rapid company growth.

The Finance team at Schweiger Dermatology Group transformed their commissions process to give providers full visibility into commissions calculations with an automated, customizable system. With the support of CaptivateIQ, they’re able to continue managing productivity bonuses accurately and transparently for their rapidly growing network of providers.

The Heroes

Colleagues Matthew Graub, Senior Director of Finance, and Marc Strauss, Senior Financial Analyst, lead the commissions function at Schweiger Dermatology Group, the largest Dermatology practice serving the Northeast region.

We are spending much less time calculating commissions. We can easily distribute productivity bonuses to providers while also distributing visibility to management. - Matthew Graub, Senior Director of Finance

We are in super growth mode and needed to streamline our commission process to get a firm grasp on one of the largest expenses on our P&L. - Marc Strauss, Senior Financial Analyst

The Challenge: Manual Commission Processing for a Rapidly Growing Network of Providers

Founded in 2010, Schweiger Dermatology Group (SDG) has expanded over the past decade to over 70 offices and 220 healthcare providers. The company provides comprehensive medical, cosmetic, and surgical dermatology services to over 750,000 patients annually.

To serve their growing patient community while delivering on the Ultimate Patient Experience, SDG relies on a dedicated team of healthcare providers. 

Schweiger Dermatology Group was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies every year since 2017. They were growing rapidly, and their Excel-based commissions process was becoming more challenging to manage. They needed a system that could take in multiple data inputs, account for specific rules and logic, and produce real-time statements to providers.

The Finance team struggled with managing quarterly compensation plans for their growing network of providers in a spreadsheet. Commission programs varied, along with components of each compensation package. For example, some programs include a threshold used to determine whether a provider gets a productivity bonus while others get a base salary as a draw, commonly referred to as a draw against commission.

Juggling all of these different plans and logic in Excel was time-consuming and unscalable. As the company entered a new chapter of rapid growth in 2020, Matthew and Marc knew they needed to implement a new solution quickly and seamlessly.

Our manual data inputs were error-prone and time-consuming. We struggled with adding new providers. CaptivateIQ helped us realize that we needed to streamline the types of plans we have and aggregate them to a few core plans as opposed to previously when many of our providers had different deal arrangements. - Marc Strauss, Senior Financial Analyst

Matthew and Marc began their search for an automated commissions solution that would ensure everyone gets paid accurately and on time. They would focus on these key requirements:

• Data Management: SDG’s Finance team needed a system that could implement data integrations from several sources, including their payroll system UKG Pro (formerly UltiPro) and their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, Salesforce.
• Commission Plan Customization: They needed a flexible solution where they could easily apply a number of custom rules like quotas and draws.
• Real-Time Visibility: SDG’s team wanted to produce real-time statements for their providers that included net collections and total payouts. Transparency was essential to disclosing the factors in administrative decisions fully. Stakeholders wanted to preview calculations, understand how they were made, and verify that they were correct.

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The Solution: Robust Plan Customization and Real-Time Visibility

SDG took a systematic approach to their commissions-related challenges and chose CaptivateIQ to help them transform and fully automate their process.

The commissions process was a tough challenge for the Finance team at SDG that was only getting more difficult as the company scaled. After a recommendation from the Chief Finance Officer, Matthew and Marc worked with the CaptivateIQ team to develop a methodical approach for transforming their commissions process. They were able to accomplish the majority of the work through the custom demo put together by CaptivateIQ’s Product Solutions team, which saved them a lot of time in the implementation process.

We worked with the CaptivateIQ team to approach commissions methodically. We created each plan one by one and troubleshooted for errors. - Matthew Graub, Senior Director of Finance

One of the considerations that were especially important to Marc and Matthew was a solution that would ensure providers get paid in a timely and accurate manner every time. Through CaptivateIQ’s robust integration capabilities, the team set up a customized schedule to fetch data from multiple sources. The result was they had all the information they needed in one single source of truth, without much manual effort. As a result, SDG’s Finance team was no longer spending countless hours wrangling data from disparate sources. Now they can easily see the big picture with a few clicks.

Another key requirement was delivering payout statements to their providers. With CaptivateIQ, they can send individual emails to each payee. Providers benefit from the increased visibility into their payouts, while administrators can leverage the data collected and processed in CaptivateIQ to summarize, model, and visualize the information. It’s a win-win for everyone!

We can confidently say that after about a year on the platform, we have not really had any complaints from our providers regarding their calculations or statements. No news is usually good news! - Marc Strauss, Senior Financial Analyst

The SDG team can now manage inquiries and disputes all in one place. Instead of keeping a separate inbox with lengthy back-and-forth email communications in order, CaptivateIQ’s Inquiries feature allows the team to resolve disputes directly within the system. There’s also a documented thread of the actions as needed for auditing purposes.

The Results: Massive Savings on Time and Errors

With CaptivateIQ, the SDG team built confidence within the company, decreased the number of days to process payments by 40 percent, and reduced payment errors to zero.

Matthew and Marc learned they needed to streamline the types of commission plans available as they worked through the onboarding process  — feeling the pain first-hand of manually tracking deal arrangements among all the different providers. After reviewing all the programs, they strategically combined them into a set of core plans that worked for everyone. 

• 1. Before using CaptivateIQ, the SDG team was experiencing dozens of errors every year due to the manual processes they were using in Excel spreadsheets. After implementing CaptivateIQ, they reduced payment errors near zero. Furthermore, they expect that number to remain low since the process no longer requires manual data manipulation between sources.
  

Automating our commissions process has not only saved us money in terms of internal resources, but it also drastically reduces the amount of revenue loss due to errors. It takes about a day to calculate everything and then another day to check for errors. - Matthew Graub, Senior Director of Finance

• 2. The commissions process before CaptivateIQ required a full headcount and would usually take a week from start to finish. Running commissions would take up to three days to compute and then an additional two days for processing and verification. Now that commissions are automated, the time spent calculating, processing, and verifying commissions decreased by 40 percent. Under the circumstances of a new process, SDG spends no more than half a day loading and processing commissions for all providers.
  

Nothing is manual anymore. So long as the logic in CaptivateIQ is set up correctly, the commission generated is correct. The only ‘manual’ task is loading the data, but it is simply taking information from one source and loading it in another. There is no manipulation of the numbers whatsoever. - Marc Strauss, Senior Financial Analyst

• 3. Looking towards the future, the SDG team expects they will be able to onboard new providers to their fully automated compensation system, and the process will remain seamless as the business flourishes.
  

CaptivateIQ is a dynamic tool that helps simplify the tracking of commissions earnings for all types of organizations; from traditional sales to medical practices. - Marc Strauss, Senior Financial Analyst

About CaptivateIQ

CaptivateIQ is on a mission to bring transparency and joy to commissions management. We believe that getting paid should be fun and that work should be a breeze for compensation plan administrators. Yet, most companies still rely on spreadsheets or legacy software providers to manage what is often the largest and most influential line item in a sales budget. That’s why we’ve created a scalable, flexible, no-code solution that enables finance and operations teams to model, automate, and optimize performance incentives. Twenty of the Forbes’ Cloud 100 including leading brands like Amplitude, Gong, and Hopin use CaptivateIQ to power their incentive compensation programs.