Most of the actual "is everyone getting paid right" question happens at one screen — the payout summary — not the log of individual jobs underneath it. Knowing what each column is supposed to show, and which few things are worth double-checking before you send money out, is most of what separates a boring payday from a dispute.
What each column actually means
A payout summary row is one technician, for whatever date range you've set. Here's what's in it, left to right:
- Technician / Pay rule — who, and which of the four pay structures they're on for this period. See how each of the four is calculated if any of them look unfamiliar.
- Rate used — the rate actually applied, not necessarily their listed default. This matters most for tiered technicians, whose rate depends on how many jobs they completed in the period itself, not a fixed number set on the roster.
- Jobs / Revenue — how many jobs, and how much they billed in total, before commission or tips. This is what "Rate used" gets applied against.
- Commission — what the rate and revenue actually produce, calculated for you.
- Tips (own) / Tip pool share — kept separate on purpose. "Tips (own)" is whatever a technician kept from their own jobs; "Tip pool share" is whatever they're owed from a shared pot. Same technician can have both in the same period.
- Total payout — commission plus both tip columns. The number that actually goes on the check.
5 jobs · $1,100.00 revenue · $440.00 commission.
$85.00 kept from own jobs, $12.50 owed from the shared tip pool.
$440.00 + $85.00 + $12.50 = $537.50 total payout
The company totals underneath
Below every technician's row, four totals add the whole period up: total job revenue, total commission paid, total tips paid out, and total payouts — what you actually owe the crew. These aren't just a courtesy subtotal. They're the fastest way to sanity-check the period before you send anything out: if total commission paid looks wildly different from a normal period with a similar job count, that's worth a second look before payday, not after.
The date range at the top
The From and To dates aren't a filter on the report — they are the pay period. Change either one and every number below updates to match. Leave both blank and you'll see every job ever logged, totaled together, which is almost never what you actually want at payday.
The four self-checks — what they actually catch
The dangerous spreadsheet error is never the one that throws an error message. It's the silent one — a technician quietly missing from a payout run, with both sides only noticing once the paycheck already looks wrong. A payout summary worth trusting checks for exactly four things:
- A job missing a date — excluded from every total until it's fixed, so it can't quietly land in the wrong period or no period at all.
- A job missing a technician — nobody gets paid for it, and nothing else on the summary would otherwise tell you it happened.
- A job for someone not on the roster — usually a name typed by hand instead of picked from a dropdown, or a technician removed from setup after the fact. Their work is invisible to every total until they're added back.
- Unallocated rounding — leftover cents from splitting a tip pool that haven't been assigned to anyone yet.
Each of these fails silently by default — the total simply comes out slightly, or significantly, wrong, with nothing flagging why. The point of checking for them explicitly is that a technician never has to be the one who notices their check is short.