Getting commission numbers out of Helios POS

Helios is a solid point-of-sale for tanning salons, spas and gyms, and a common complaint in reviews is that the reporting doesn't go as deep as owners want. That's fair for commission specifically: the data is all there, but the report that gives you a per-person split of product and service isn't the one most people find first.

This is what we learned building a commission board on top of it.

The report you want

Average Sales by Location/Employee. It's the one report that breaks sales down per person in the shape a commission calculation needs. Set the date range to your commission period — the first of the month to today for a running total, or the full month once it's closed.

You get, per employee:

Product and service split separately, which is what makes a product-mix rule possible — "flat bonus if product is over 25% of your sales" needs both halves.

Gotcha one: ONLINE SALES is not a person

The report includes a row for online sales, and it has exactly the same shape as an employee row — a name, client counts, product and service figures. Paste it into a spreadsheet and it becomes a member of staff.

This is not a cosmetic problem. When we first hit it, the online row took second place on the leaderboard and dragged the team's per-client average from $10.65 to $21.79, which pushed a real member of staff from third of three to fourth of four and made everyone look below average.

Watch for the same shape from other non-person rows depending on your setup: walk-in or house accounts, totals and subtotal lines, and anything prefixed with your store name. Strip them before you calculate anything.

Gotcha two: renaming somebody creates a new person

If commission is tracked by name — and in a spreadsheet it always is — then changing how a name is written in Helios silently creates a second person. A marriage, a spelling fix, shortening a surname: the old name keeps its history, the new name starts at zero, and nothing errors. It just looks like a new hire and a colleague who stopped selling.

Whatever you use downstream, it needs a way to say "this spelling is that person". If it's a spreadsheet, that means checking the name list every month against your roster. It's tedious and it's the single most common way commission history gets lost.

Gotcha three: the date range is the period

The report gives you what happened inside the range you ask for, with no notion of your commission month. If you run it on the 3rd for last month, you must set the range to last month — the default will not do it for you. It's obvious right up until the month somebody runs it on the wrong dates and pays from it.

The safer habit is a fixed routine: same day each month, same range, and the export saved before anyone touches it.

From report to commission

Once you have clean per-person product and service figures, the calculation is whatever your plan says. The two structures we see most in tanning:

• A threshold plan — nothing until a share of goal, then a rate that climbs. Understand what the threshold does before you set it; the threshold guide works through why crossing it pays out on the whole month at once.
• Product and EFT bonuses on top — a flat amount for beating a product-mix share, and something for memberships. See the EFT commission guide.

Doing it monthly by hand

A spreadsheet is a perfectly reasonable answer for a small team. The realistic cost is an hour or two each month, plus the risk of the three gotchas above, plus the fact that staff only see their numbers once — after it's too late to change them.

That last part is the real argument against manual. A commission plan is supposed to change behaviour during the month. A report that arrives after payroll can only describe it.

CommissionBoard reads that same report automatically while the salon is open, strips the non-person rows, keeps names matched across spellings, and puts each person's current standing on their phone. It's read-only against Helios — it never writes anything back.