Our plans weren't fully set up when the period started so we paid everyone out on 100% attainment as a placeholder, with the plan to true it up once the real data came in. When we ran the actual numbers, every single rep had been overpaid. Some by a few hundred, some by a few thousand.
Went to the team to explain we'd need to claw it back in installments. Almost to a person, the response was some version of: that's on you, the company made the error, and I've already spent it.
They weren't wrong. But it left us in this impossible spot of manually tracking partial clawbacks across 15 people, each with different commission balances available each month.
Took three months to fully unwind and the trust damage lasted longer than that. How would you handle this? Both the mechanics and the conversation with the team.