How to Calculate Technician Commissions Without Losing Half a Business Day

One Australian plumbing business was spending half a business day working out technician commissions by hand. Now AI does the calculations and prepares the reports, and a person checks them. The owner estimates this one automation alone gives him back about four hours a week.

Here are the four steps behind automating commission calculations, a one-page template to start with, and what AI does not do in this process.

Step 1: Write out your commission structure on one page

This is the step that does most of the work. AI can only follow rules that are clear, so the first job is getting your commission structure onto one page.

In this particular build, the owner already had a first version working from a spreadsheet. I turned it into a documented skill, with his rules written down in order so it follows the same method every week. We also found that the written commission agreement and the way he actually calculated things didn't fully match. Deciding which one was right came before anything else.

Copy this and fill it in:

Step 2: Get the weekly numbers in one place

Your AI model will need access to the data in order to make the calculations. For each job, it will need: the job total, which technician did it, the gross margin, how much has been paid against the total, the date, and whether it was after hours. If your job management software can produce a weekly report with those fields, you're most of the way there. Give your AI model that report each week (or have it delivered somewhere your AI can read it automatically) and move to step 3. If it can't, fix that first before attempting to go any further.

Step 3: Ask AI to prepare one report per technician

Each week, your AI model reads the numbers, applies your rules, works out the commission owed on each job and prepares a report for each technician. A job with a balance still owing waits until it's paid in full, then appears on the report.

Step 4: A human checks it before anything goes out

It does not run payroll and it does not pay anyone. Someone in your business checks every commission report before it goes to a technician or into a pay run. Money is the one thing I never let go out unchecked.

What it saves, and what it doesn't

The owner of this Australian plumbing business estimates about four hours saved each week from this one automation alone. I haven't timed it myself, so treat that as his number, not a promise. Your saving depends on how many technicians you have, how tangled your rules are and how organised your data is.

This is also about speed, not legal advice. Whether your commission arrangement meets your award and employment agreements is a question for Fair Work or your accountant.

Write it once, check it weekly

Commission calculations are a great job to hand over to AI because the work is the same every week and the rules rarely change. The hard part is never the maths when it comes to using AI. It's having rules and business processes clear enough that you can write them down and hand them off to your new AI assistant.

One last thing: fill in the one-page template above today. If you can't write a rule in one sentence, that's the rule to fix first, with or without AI.

If you lose a morning every week to commission calculations or any type of repetitive admin task, book a free 30-minute call. We'll look at your rules and business processes together and work out what can be handed over to AI and what still needs a human involved.