A guide to the many ways AngelTrack can calculate commissions for salespeople
AngelTrack's billing system can produce the data needed to calculate commissions for your salespeople and billers.
A prerequisite for this topic is an understanding of AngelTrack's Critical Dates for Accounting.
Report Builder is the Best Tool for This Task
The best way to calculate commissions is to use Report Builder, as it gives you the freedom to express the exact combination of filters and SUMs to capture your relationship with your salespeople.
Be aware of the differing dates -- the date of service, versus the date that cash receipts were legally received, versus the date when bookkeeping was performed -- when building your report. In Report Builder, the datasets in the "Dispatches" category are organized by date of service, while those in the "Payment Events" category are organized by the date when monies were legally received (though it also includes columns for date of bookkeeping).
Commissions Per Call / Flat Rate Per Trip
Because per-call commission structures differ so widely, requiring myriad filters in order to identify eligible trips, you need AngelTrack's Report Builder for this.
Report Builder is a premium feature, requiring a license. If you do not have access to it, you can still use its many datasets to export the raw data to Excel, where you can complete the analysis manually. You will find everything you need in the Data Hub.
Paying flat rate commissions for specific facilities
If your salespeople have signed specific facilities, Report Builder can zoom in on those facilities. Make sure you understand the difference between origin facility -- which is the location where the patient was picked up from or returned to -- versus the bill-to facility which is a billing choice that is usually but not necessarily the same as the origin facility.
Report Builder also has a field named "Repose Facility" that contains the origin name for an outbound or one-way trip, or the destination name for a return trip.
Commissions as a Percentage of the Price Quote
The same caveats apply to this approach as for Flat Rate Per Call commission structures: The myriad filter requirements needed to zoom in on each salesperson's eligible runs.
You will need the Dispatches-Financial dataset from Report Builder. If you do not have a Report Builder license, you can still export that dataset from the Data Hub, and then perform the calculations yourself in Excel.
Commissions as a Percentage of Cash Receipts
Calculating commissions as a percentage of cash receipts is difficult, because future bookkeeping could alter the amounts recorded in the past.
There are two reports in AngelTrack that organize data by the date of bookkeeping, rather than by the date received (i.e. the date printed on the check you got in the mail), or by the date of service:
The Payment Event Finder report
The Payment Event Finder is able to filter by date of bookkeeping, allowing you to calculate commissions based on monies that were processed during the time period, regardless of date of service and regardless of the date when the money legally changed hands*. It will produce a dataset of the raw payment events, which you can then analyze as you see fit in your spreadsheet application. Use that data to calculate the commissions owed.
The following ambiguous situations can drastically change any commission calculation:
- Payment events that are subsequently deleted, and which are normally omitted by the report.
- Reversals.
- Payment events for dispatches that are cancelled or marked non-billable.
- Payment events for dispatches that are still open, i.e. monies associated with future trips.
- Payment events that are later modified to correct typographical errors.
*The "date received", sometimes misnomored as the "posting date", is the date when money was legally received by the company. It is normal for billers to perform bookkeeping today for cash that was legally received (but not yet booked) one or two weeks ago. Consequently, the date-received may not suffice for commissions calculations, because future bookkeeping could add debits or credits that occurred in the past, necessitating a restatement of commission statements for that time period. For further reading, see the Critical Dates for Accounting guide.
The Billing Activity Visualizer report
The Billing Activity Visualizer exists to show you approximately how busy your billers are. We recommend against using it to calculate commissions unless your commissions structure matches the report's assumptions:
- Include approvals/reversals, denials (as these often include reversals), and invoice payments;
- Exclude payment events that are presently marked as deleted;
- Include monetary amounts from reversals, subtracting them from the monetary totals; and
- Include payment events associated with dispatches that are cancelled, non-billable, unpriced, or still open.
The Payment Event Finder has filters to allow it to match the Billing Activity Visualizer, but this is useful only if your commission agreement already matches these assumptions.
Reconciling a commission statement against retroactive bookkeeping
Using the "date of bookkeeping" for your commissions calculation is not foolproof, because certain bookkeeping events can cause the commissions totals to change retroactively. For example, if you calculate commissions on August 1st for billing activities performed in July, then the following biller actions taken later will cause the numbers to change retroactively:
- A biller in August deletes a July payment event found to be in error;
- A biller in August undeletes a July payment event found to be deleted in error; or
- A biller in August modifies a July payment event to correct an incorrect monetary amount.
Due to the complexity of EMS billing, we have created a process which might meet your needs. It's important that you review the below process with your accountant and/or legal consultant in order to verify that it meets your contractual obligations. Additionally, your billers may also need to comply with certain requirements in order to avoid causing issues with retroactive editing.
- On the first day of the month, use the Payment Event Finder to pull all non-deleted payment events for the preceding commission period. For example, on August 1st, pull all payment events whose date of bookkeeping is on-or-after July 1st / before August 1st.
- Export the data for safe keeping.
- You may also pull the matching Billing Activity Visualizer report, if your commissions structure is consistent with that report's assumptions, as discussed above.
- Prepare your commissions statement normally.
- Wait one month.
- Repeat steps 1 and 2 for the same commission period. For example, on September 1, pull the data again for on-or-after July 1 / before August 1. Export the grid and keep it alongside the data exported a month earlier.
- Recalculate your commissions. If there is any change, it is due to a biller making the aforementioned corrections to the payment event records. Remember that corrections are normal and expected in any healthy billing operation; mistakes are unavoidable, and good billers are constantly finding and correcting their own errors.
- If there is any change in the commissions total, add it as a credit or debit on the next commissions statement.
- If you are required to identify the exact edits that resulted in the change, use a file-compare tool to compare the two Payment Event Finder exports that you saved. The file-compare tool should highlight any differences for you:
- Rows missing from the later report are payment events that were deleted after the earlier report was taken.
- New rows appearing in the later report are payment events that were undeleted after the earlier report was taken.
- Changed rows are payment events that were modified after the earlier report was taken. (Changes are also reflected in the "Record Modified" columns.)
Commissions as Bounties for Insurance Coders
If you pay a bounty to the biller who coded and claimed the dispatch, Report Builder's Dispatches-Coding dataset contains the fields you need to divvy up the commissions among your coders.
If you do not have a Report Builder license, then you can still use the Data Hub to export the Dispatches-Coding dataset, and perform the analysis yourself in Excel.
Normally, coder bounties are calculated as a percentage of the price adjudicated by the primary carrier. You can get this data by including the Dispatches-Financial dataset.
Per-Patient Commissions
If you pay your salespeople commissions per patient, rather than per facility, then AngelTrack can help you calculate their commissions.
You can calculate commissions using data exported by the Payment Event Finder, which can report monies received by date range, by patient name and DOB, by service level, and many other filters. The 
exported data-set contains all datafields necessary to perform the calculation in a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel™ or Google Sheets™.
Report Builder is also excellent for this task. If you don't have a license for Report Builder, then you can still use its datasets and perform the analysis in Excel.
Keep in mind the difference between the date of service versus the date received (aka the posting date) versus the bookkeeping date (i.e. the date that a biller actually booked a cash receipt). The bookkeeping date may be most appropriate when sales commissions are calculated as a percentage of cash receipts, so as to avoid the possibility of under-payment or double-payment when retroactive bookkeeping is later performed.