TEAM Comunicaciones has a sales force of over 500 people. Each of them, at the end of their payment cycle, expected a figure that depended on more than 20 different parameters: the organizational chart, the hiring scheme, the products and services sold, among others. And that figure was calculated, until recently, in Excel files.
It wasn't just one Excel. There were several, distributed according to the payment cycle: some teams were settled weekly, others biweekly, others monthly. Each cycle with its own sheet, its own logic, and its own risk of error.
The challenge beyond the software
When more than 20 rules coexist in a spreadsheet, the probability of error stops being a remote possibility. Each settlement involved reprocessing, manual re-entry, and the constant review of formulas that a change in the organizational chart or in the hiring scheme could render obsolete from one cycle to another.
But the underlying problem was not just the margin of error. It was that the business information, something as central as how much is paid to the sales force, was scattered across individual files and not in an integrated online system. No one had a consolidated and reliable view of the commissions while they were distributed like this.
Why this was not resolved within Odoo
The commission scheme of the sales force of TEAM Comunicaciones did not resemble anything that an ERP solves in a standard way: the specific combination of rules, cycles, and variables was a logic unique to the business, not a typical sales or payroll process.
That is why IntegraTeam was designed as a custom development, integrated with Odoo, so that the commission information would not be isolated from the rest of the operation. And although licensing Odoo for each of the more than 500 people in the sales force to check their commission would not have been viable either, that savings was an additional benefit of the decision, not the reason it originated: the real challenge remained designing a system that accurately replicated a business logic that until then only existed in the minds of those who prepared the Excel sheets each cycle.
IntegraTeam: the system that replaced Excel
The answer was IntegraTeam, a custom development integrated with Odoo. Today the sales force captures their sales in real time, and IntegraTeam automatically calculates each person's commission by applying the parameterized rules, regardless of whether their payment cycle is weekly, biweekly, or monthly.
The system runs in parallel with the manual calculation while the team finishes gaining confidence in the results, and the differences that have appeared when comparing both calculations have almost always been human error in the manual process, not an error of the system.
What changed in the team
Automating this calculation freed up time that was previously spent reprocessing and verifying Excel sheets. That time allowed team members to take on other responsibilities, including portfolio tasks, right in the middle of an internal restructuring of the company.
And there's a finding worth sharing honestly: in an informal review, the team detected that some payments were being made twice — an error that the manual nature of the previous process made almost impossible to catch in time. The fact that the calculation no longer depended solely on human hands was precisely what made it possible to catch it.
The lesson behind the case
And there's a finding worth sharing honestly: in an informal review, the team detected that some payments were being made twice — an error that the manual nature of the previous process made almost impossible to catch in time. The fact that the calculation no longer depended solely on human hands was precisely what made it possible to catch it.
If your company has a process this critical resting on an Excel spreadsheet and the memory of whoever manages it, it's worth reviewing before the error repeats 500 times.