Compensation Plan Simulator

Overview

Compensation plan changes in direct-selling companies are high-stakes decisions that affect company margins, distributor earnings, and field retention — yet most companies design them with spreadsheets, gut instinct, or expensive consultants, with no way to see the financial ripple effects before going live.

This simulator turns a blind, slow, high-risk process into a visual, instant, reversible one. Operations leaders adjust commission rates, override percentages, and network parameters, then see real-time financial impact across KPIs, waterfall charts, and break-even curves.

The Challenge

• No visibility into payout exposure — changing one tier's override rate ripples through the entire cost structure in ways spreadsheets can't easily show
• Slow iteration cycles — testing a comp plan change in the real world takes months and risks distributor morale if it doesn't land
• Siloed analysis — finance sees costs, field leaders see motivation, but nobody sees both side-by-side in real time
• Cascading effects — override depth, qualification thresholds, and headcount ratios interact in non-linear ways that are impossible to reason about intuitively

The Solution

A fully interactive, client-side simulator that lets users configure two compensation plans side-by-side and see the financial impact instantly:

• Configure Tab — Adjust personal discounts, override rates, override depth, and qualification rules across 3 tiers (Consultant, Leader, Leader of Leaders)
• Financial Dashboard — 6 real-time KPIs: total revenue, total payout, company margin, margin %, avg consultant payout, avg leader payout — with delta indicators
• Revenue Waterfall — Stacked waterfall chart showing gross revenue through discounts, overrides, down to net margin
• Break-Even Analysis — Line chart plotting current vs. proposed cost curves at up to 3x volume with crossover point detection
• Comparison Table — Side-by-side metrics with dollar deltas, percentage deltas, and color-coded indicators
• 4 Presets — Default, Aggressive Overrides, Flat Structure, High Growth scenarios
• Shareable Links — Full state compressed and encoded in URL for team review

Technical Highlights

• Zero backend — all calculations run client-side as pure functions, easily testable with no React dependencies
• Zustand state management handles ~5 interdependent state groups without excessive re-renders
• URL state encoding — full configuration compressed with lz-string into a ?s= query param via debounced history.replaceState
• Break-even crossover detection — iterates over 200 volume scale points to find the exact crossover
• Bilingual — full EN/ES with the same i18n pattern used across the CushLabs portfolio
• CushLabs design system — Space Grotesk + Source Serif 4 + DM Mono, tier-specific color scheme, responsive grid, print styles