The Reserves Network (TRN) is a leading provider of flexible staffing services, including temporary, temp-to-hire and direct hire placements. Founded in 1984, the company has more than 40 branches across the country and places nearly 20,000 employees annually. It covers a wide range of light industrial, technical, professional and medical staffing.

Challenges

When you’re a nationwide business that has grown primarily through acquisitions, managing commissions becomes a nearly impossible task on Excel. Katie Dula and Angela Holland, both longtime accountants in the staffing business, were faced with the challenge of integrating new plans from new companies on a regular basis.

We had one-off plans that were being driven by type of recruiter, skill level of the recruiter, but also by acquisitions at the company level. These all had to be manually entered into spreadsheets.‍

Complex Ecosystem

In the staffing industry, commissions calculations include a variety of factors including each branch’s profit sharing rules, the gross profit being pulled in by the individual recruiter, as well as the compensation plan for the sales rep who worked with the recruiter. There are several stakeholders, each with their own set of rules and incentives.

Easing Acquisition Anxiety

TRN has built its company significantly through acquisitions over the past few decades and as a result, it has inherited the compensation plans of several acquired teams. Ideally, the acquired sales reps, recruiters and account executives would be immediately rolled over onto the parent company’s compensation plans, but in reality, the transition happens quite slowly. 

It’s important to be sensitive about changes to compensation plans for acquired employees.

TRN takes its time with acquired teams to ensure that communications are clear and that all parties are comfortable with changes that are being made to compensation. However, this approach comes at a cost and the burden of adopting multiple new compensation plans and calculation rules falls primarily on TRN’s accountants.

Lack of Transparency

With approximately 200 individuals and multiple plans with multiple sets of rules, the accounting team at TRN was unable to provide a granular level of transparency in its monthly reports. Payees would receive a final number each month without knowing what key drivers yielded the final number. 

Solution

FLEXIBLE & ROBUST

With so many plans - from TRN itself and from its acquired teams - it was critically important that they adopt a platform that was flexible and robust enough to handle TRN’s complex ecosystem.

CaptivateIQ's platform is robust in that you’re able to build out multiple plans, multiple tiers and get that efficiency in payouts.‍

TRANSPARENT

In the past, TRN’s payees would simply receive a final payout number. These days, everyone is able to log into the platform and have increased visibility across the team on how calculations were made and what key drivers resulted in final payout numbers.

The thing our team likes the most is the visibility. Being able to show how the payout was calculated instead of just sending them a final number for the month has been great.‍

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

CaptivateIQ knows that it must keep up with the pace of innovation of its customers. As a result, we are constantly launching new features to make our users’ lives easier. We are proud to have been noticed by the TRN accounting team for our innovative mindset.

You guys are newer and growing and it’s nice to see all of the new features that are always coming out!

Results

It’s been a year and half since TRN adopted CaptivateIQ and we are thrilled to have eased a pain point that normally arises during acquisitions.

Once our acquired teams start using CaptivateIQ, they say, ‘Wow, this is nice!'

We know that commissions are not only complex, but also highly emotional as it is tied to the financial well-being of individuals. It is our mission to ensure that our platform enables both payers and payees to feel empowered, informed and confident in their commissions tool. If you’re curious to know whether CaptivateIQ can improve your commissions operations, we'd love to hear from you!