Set up manager compensation

Manager Compensation pays department managers a bonus calculated from their department's margin, using the Department P&L that Job Costing produces. It's a separate system from technician Commissions — commissions pay techs per completed job, this pays managers per department per period.

Turn it on first

This screen only appears once Manager compensation is enabled on the Job Costing settings page (/settings/job-costing, Owner-only). It's the third of three independent rollout switches — reporting, then cost/revenue capture, then compensation — so a department needs real P&L data flowing before a compensation run against it means anything. If compensation isn't enabled, this page redirects to Settings.

Compensation schedules

A schedule assigns one manager to one department with a progressive basis-point payout: each band applies its rate to the department's margin above that band's threshold, up to the next band. Choose Add schedule and set:

Manager and Department — fixed for the life of the schedule; to reassign either one, deactivate this schedule and create a new one.
Effective from / to — the date range this schedule applies to. Leave "to" blank for an open-ended schedule.
Basis-point bands — at least one required. Each band is a margin threshold (in cents) and a rate (100 = 1.00%); add more bands to pay a higher rate on margin above a higher threshold.
Flat bonus (optional) — a fixed amount added on top of the band-calculated payout.
Cap (optional) — the maximum total payout for this schedule in a single run, regardless of what the bands and bonus compute out.

A schedule can be edited or deactivated from its row. Deactivating stops it from being used in future runs — a run that already used it under approved status keeps its history untouched.

Running compensation

Run compensation calculates payouts for a period: for every active schedule whose effective range covers the period, it pulls that department's margin from the P&L for that period and applies the schedule's bands, bonus, and cap. A run always starts Pending — nothing is paid until it's approved, and Thermal won't let you create a second run covering the same period twice.

Approve a pending run once you've checked its entries in the Review tab. Approving is what makes the payout count as real — approved entries are what show up filtered on the Ledger.
Reverse an approved run to undo it. Reversing creates a new, auto-approved run with every entry negated — it doesn't delete or edit the original, so the full history (including who reversed it and when) stays on the record.

Review a run

Open Review from a run's row to see every entry it produced: manager, department (linking through to that department's P&L for the period), margin, revenue, cost, flat bonus, and the resulting compensation. A reversal entry is labeled inline. Every entry keeps its own margin, revenue, and cost snapshot from when the run was calculated — editing a schedule afterward never rewrites a run that already ran under the old numbers.

The ledger

The Ledger tab lists every compensation entry ever produced, across every run, newest first, with each run's status attached. Use Export CSV (Ledger tab or the page header) to download the full ledger for payroll or accounting.

Reference

Who can reach Manager Compensation — Owners and Office users only; Dispatchers and Technicians can't. See Roles & permissions.
Run status values (Pending / Approved / Reversed) — see Status & domain values.