Sales Payroll
Fully-loaded base compensation for account executives, SDRs, and sales leadership for the period. Excludes commissions, which are tracked separately because they scale with bookings. — Finance KPI, I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier).
I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier)
No public third-party standard anchors this KPI yet, so I'mBoard authors and maintains the definition — transparently labeled as editorial tier. See the ontology methodology for the published vs editorial tier system and the back-attribution workstream.
Rogue ID: finance.sales_payroll
Type: Currency
Domain: Finance
Definition
Fully-loaded base compensation for account executives, SDRs, and sales leadership for the period. Excludes commissions, which are tracked separately because they scale with bookings.
Formula
Fully-loaded sales base personnel cost for the period (excl. commissions).Why it matters
The fixed component of go-to-market cost; pairs with commissions for full sales cost.
How to interpret
Read with bookings to gauge sales efficiency; keep separate from variable commissions.
Calculation policy
How an AI agent should compute this KPI from messy company data. Free-text rules consumed at reasoning time — not a deterministic DSL. The most common ways to get this wrong are listed under Common miscomputations.
Inclusion rules
- Fully-loaded BASE compensation for account executives, SDRs, and sales leadership (employees), excluding commissions.
Exclusion rules
- Variable commissions — those are finance.sales_commissions, kept separate because they scale with bookings.
- Marketing staff (finance.marketing_payroll) and customer-success staff (finance.cs_payroll).
Required inputs
- Sales roster with fully-loaded base cost.
- A clean split of base vs variable compensation.
Edge cases
- A guaranteed draw is base-like; earned commission above the draw belongs in finance.sales_commissions.
- Ramp/guarantee comp for new reps sits in base until commissions are earned.
Validation checks
- Pairs with finance.sales_commissions for full sales cost; rolls into finance.total_sm.
Common miscomputations
- Bundling commissions into base payroll — hides the bookings-linked variable component and distorts the fixed-vs-variable view of CAC.
Related KPIs
finance.total_smfinance.sales_commissions
Source
I'mBoard editorial — authored and maintained by I'mBoard, first published 2026-04-01. No third-party standard is cited for this KPI; when one emerges, the definition is back-attributed and promoted to the published tier (a minor version bump). Read the ontology methodology for the published vs editorial tier system, attribution rules, and dispute process.
Stage relevance
| Company stage | Priority |
|---|---|
| Series A | Recommended |
| Series B | Recommended |
| Series C+ | Recommended |
| Public | Recommended |
Suggested for stages: Series A, Series B, Series C+, Public.
Default owning functions
- Finance
Machine-readable
- This KPI as JSON:
/api/ontology/finance/sales_payroll.json - All Finance KPIs:
/api/ontology/finance.json - Full catalog:
/api/ontology/index.json
Sales Commissions
Variable sales compensation earned on bookings for the period. Separated from sales payroll because it scales with deals closed and explains period-to-period variance differently. — Finance KPI, I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier).
Services Delivery Costs
Direct cost of delivering implementation and professional services — the cost paired with services/implementation revenue. Tracking it against `finance.services_revenue` reveals whether services are run at, above, or below cost. — Finance KPI, I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier).