Placement + Commission Tracking for a Recruiting Agency

What Wasn’t Working

Client J was manually updating a spreadsheet every time her team made a placement. That meant entering the candidate info, company, fee percentage, recruiter commission splits, projected billing dates, and more—by hand. Each recruiter had a different commission agreement, so she had to remember all of their structures and do the math herself every time. There were also a ton of errors, duplicated effort, and hours wasted copying numbers into dashboards, projections, or team reports. The anxiety around underpaying or overpaying someone, or just missing a key detail, was always hanging over her.

What We Built

We rebuilt the entire system from the ground up using Google Sheets—designed to look and feel like an app. Client J now enters the basics for a placement (like who placed it, salary, fee %, etc.), and the sheet does the rest. Here’s what changed:

• Commission totals are calculated automatically based on each recruiter’s custom agreement

• Built-in logic handles split roles, junior recruiters, supervisor overrides, and edge cases

• Monthly + YTD totals are auto-generated for each team member

• Each recruiter has their own dashboard that filters out just their data, in real time

• A personal P&L view shows paid vs. upcoming commissions, salary paid, bonuses, and more

• Recruiter info only needs to be updated in one place to reflect across the whole system

• All numbers feed into Client J’s main ops sheets: projections, goals, bonuses, and spend

• The system even tracks invoice status and flips commissions from “upcoming” to “paid” automatically once payment is received

• Draft invoices are created automatically in QuickBooks (based on key fields being filled), so she can review and send when ready

The Outcome

This system easily saved Client J hours every week—no more calculating commission splits by hand, triple-checking formulas, rebuilding dashboards from scratch. She was able to offload the entire tracking process to the system, which meant she could focus on other priorities: refining client experience, exploring new lead gen tools, and building out better onboarding and hiring processes. Her team now gets accurate, up-to-date dashboards that they don’t have to ask for. And Client J finally has clean, trustworthy numbers that don’t depend on her brain to hold everything together.