thread Re: Commission Based on Gross sales not Net Sales? in Staff & Payroll

Commission Based on Gross sales not Net Sales?

spgsmantachie — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 06:05:35 GMT

Hey y'all! My small pet grooming salon has 3 employees besides myself the owner. Recently, I've noticed that if we have to refund a service due to a mischarge (so the service was never done), the system calculates their commission based on the gross sales, which include those refunds. This means if I run payroll automatically, it will pay them commission for services they never did, meaning I'm paying them for nothing. Is there a way to change their commission to go based off net sales, so I don't have to go through every day and change their pay manually?

Thanks so much!

Re: Commission Based on Gross sales not Net Sales?

Bronze_Palms — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:23:45 GMT

Hi! Have you explored the calculation of commission page?

Here is the link to it where you can factor in if commissions are taken off of gross or net. https://app.squareup.com/dashboard/team/commissions

Re: Commission Based on Gross sales not Net Sales?

Sammie_C — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:41:27 GMT

Hi @spgsmantachie, thank you for reaching out about this. I appreciate your insight on this as well, @Bronze_Palms! This a great resource you provided.

I checked with our Operations team and they said that the commission should be unchanged from the original sale. Do you have an example sale or transaction of this occurring?

Please let me know if this answers your question for you. If not, I can take another look into this for you.

Also, just to let you know I move this post from our Square Appointments board to the Square Staff and Payroll board. Just to keep everything organized.

Re: Commission Based on Gross sales not Net Sales?

TheRealChipA — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 22:27:02 GMT

@Sammie_C I believe that what @spgsmantachie is saying is this.

If an appointment transaction is refunded for some reason, the amount of the commission for the employee assigned to that transaction is NOT deducted from the commissions due to that employee. I ran a test and created an appointment assigned to me. Then I paid it to cash. Then I refunded the payment and cancelled the appointment. Unfortunately, while the payment was refunded, the commission is still showing on my team sales record and will be imported to my payroll. That is definitely a bug.

Re: Commission Based on Gross sales not Net Sales?

Sammie_C — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 22:56:57 GMT

I understand, @TheRealChipA. Thank you for clarifying that! It does seem like it may not be working as intended.

@spgsmantachie, if you have an example, our Operations team would be interested in taking a look. Feel free to send your screenshot through this thread, or if there is any private information feel free to send it over as a direct message to me.

Re: Commission Based on Gross sales not Net Sales?

packyard — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:55:10 GMT

I ran into the exact same issue with Square. Any refunded or canceled appointment was still counting toward commission, so payroll kept paying out for services that never actually happened. I tried adjusting things inside Square, but it never fully solved it and I still had to double-check payroll manually.

What ended up working for me was calculating commissions outside of Square and only using Square as the POS. I switched to Packyard packyard.app mainly because it was free for solo groomers and I wanted to test it without committing to another paid tool.

It pulls in Square transactions, accounts for refunds and cancellations, and calculates commission based on actual completed sales. That way I’m only paying commission on money that was actually earned.

Not ideal that Square doesn’t handle this cleanly yet, but this at least removed the daily manual fixes for me.