Landscaping sales commission structure: how to pay designers and salespeople without draining cash

September 23, 2026

Almost everything written about landscaping money is about job costing: what a job really cost you once labour, materials and overhead are counted. That matters. But if you run a design-build company, there is another money question that nobody seems to write about, and it can hurt just as much: how do you pay the people who sell the work?

Get it wrong in one direction and your designers and salespeople stop pushing, because the reward is too far away. Get it wrong in the other and you pay out on a big sale in spring, the job shrinks or cancels in summer, and the commission has already left the bank.

This article is about building a commission plan that does both jobs: rewards the sale, and never pays out money you have not collected. The percentages are yours to set. The structure is what this article is about.

Start with what commission is for

A commission plan is a message. It tells your people what you want more of.

If you pay on the contract price, you are saying "sell big".
If you pay on profit, you are saying "sell work we make money on".
If you pay only once the job is paid for, you are saying "sell to customers who pay".

All three are reasonable. Most companies want some of each. Decide which message matters most before you pick a number, because the number means nothing until you know what it is a share of.

Decide what you pay on

Contract price. Simple to calculate and easy for a salesperson to understand. The risk: it rewards discounting. A salesperson who knocks the price down to close still gets paid on a job that may now make you very little.

Gross profit or margin. Rewards selling work at the right price. The risk: your salespeople have to trust your cost numbers, and those numbers are only final once the job is built. If your job costing is shaky, a margin-based plan will cause arguments.

Collected revenue. Pays only on money that has actually arrived. The safest for cash, and the slowest for the person waiting to be paid.

A common middle path is to pay on the contract price, but adjust it at the end for anything that changed: discounts given after the sale, work removed, change orders added. Whatever you choose, write down how each of these is handled:

Change orders. Does the salesperson earn on work added after the sale? If they sold it, many owners say yes.
Discounts. Who pays for a discount the salesperson offered to close: the company, or the commission?
Design fees. If you charge for design separately, is the designer paid on the design fee, on the build, or both?
Materials passed through at cost. Should anyone earn commission on plants or stone you sell at cost?

Decide who gets paid

In a design-build company, a sale often passes through more than one person: someone takes the first call, a designer draws it, a salesperson closes it. Sometimes the designer is the salesperson.

If more than one person touches the sale, decide the split before the job, not after. Arguing about who deserves credit for a sale that has already happened is how good people leave. Write down who earns what share at each step, and what happens when one person does two steps.

Decide when you pay it

This is where most plans go wrong, and where the cash goes.

Pay it all at signing. It feels great to the salesperson. It is the riskiest for you. The job has not started, the customer has paid a deposit at most, and anything can change.

Pay it all at completion. Safe for you. For a job that takes weeks to build, or waits months in a queue, the reward is so far from the sale that it stops motivating anyone.

Pay it in two steps: part at the sale, the rest at the close. This is the shape we built for a design-build company, and it is the one we would suggest looking at first:

At the sale, pay the first part. The salesperson sees a reward soon after the work they did. You pay out only a portion while the job is still a promise.
At the close, when the job is finished and paid, pay the rest, adjusted for anything that changed along the way.

How big each part is, and exactly what "sale" and "close" mean for you, is your decision. Two definitions to write down:

What counts as the sale. A signed contract? A signed contract and a deposit received? Tying the first payment to the deposit, not only the signature, means you never pay out on a sale the customer has not put money behind.
What counts as the close. The last day of work? The final invoice sent? The final payment received? If you want to stop paying out on jobs that never get collected, the close has to mean paid.

What happens when a job falls through

Every plan needs an answer to this before it happens:

The customer cancels after the first part was paid. Is it taken back from future commission, or written off? Either can be fair. Deciding it in the moment, with a name attached, is never fair.
The job shrinks. Work is removed, or the price is cut. Does the second part adjust down, or does the first part get corrected too?
The customer never pays the final invoice. If the second part is only paid on collection, this handles itself.
The salesperson leaves between the sale and the close. Are they paid the second part when the job closes?

What the law says about these, in Virginia and Alabama

This explains what the law says. It is not legal advice. Before you adopt a plan, have an employment lawyer in your state read it.

Virginia treats commissions as wages, and that brings three hard rules (Code of Virginia § 40.1-29):

Taking commission back out of someone's pay needs their written, signed authorization. The law bars an employer from withholding any part of an employee's wages without it, apart from taxes and deductions the law requires (§ 40.1-29(D)).
When someone leaves, everything "due" is paid by the next regular payday (§ 40.1-29(B)). Whether the second part of a commission on a job that has not closed yet is "due" is not answered by the law's text. When your written plan says a commission is earned is where that question starts, which is why the plan has to say it.
An employer can't make employees sign away wages for time they have worked, other than executive personnel (§ 40.1-29(E)). Whether a clawback clause counts as that kind of forfeiture is not something the law's text answers. It is the first question to ask your lawyer.

We found no Virginia law saying an employee's commission plan must be in writing. In practice it has to be: the signed authorization for any clawback, and the definition of when commission is earned, both have to be written down to work.

In Alabama, we found no state law on when an employee's commission is earned, whether it can be taken back, whether the plan must be written, or when it is paid after someone leaves. Alabama's commission law (Code of Alabama § 8-24-1 and following) covers sales representatives who solicit wholesale orders for a manufacturer or distributor, and its definition expressly leaves out home solicitation sales. It does not cover a salesperson selling design-build work. So in Alabama, the answer is almost entirely what your written plan says. Ask a lawyer to confirm that for your business.

Everywhere, federal law sets a floor. A clawback cannot take an employee's pay for a week below the federal minimum wage or cut into overtime they are owed (29 C.F.R. § 531.35).

So the honest answer to "can I take commission back?" and "what do I owe someone who leaves?" is: it depends on what your written plan says, within those limits. That is the best argument for the next section.

Write the plan down

A commission plan that lives in the owner's head is a plan that gets renegotiated every payday. Put it on one page, and have everyone it covers read and sign it:

Who is covered, and what role each person plays in a sale
What commission is paid on, and how change orders, discounts, design fees and pass-through materials are handled
The split between people, when more than one touches a sale
When each part is paid, with "sale" and "close" defined
What happens on cancellation, a smaller job, non-payment, or someone leaving
When the plan can change, and how much notice people get

Make it add itself up

The best plan in the world fails if someone has to work it out by hand at the end of every month. Hand-built commission spreadsheets break in predictable ways: a change order that never made it across, a discount nobody recorded, a job counted as closed before it was paid.

Commission is easiest to get right when it comes from the same records as the job itself: the sale, the changes, the invoices and the payments. If each job already records who designed it, who sold it, what it sold for, what changed and what has been collected, the commission is arithmetic, not detective work.

If you are running on spreadsheets, a simple step helps: keep one row per job with the salesperson, the designer, the contract price, every change, the date the deposit arrived and the date the final payment arrived. The commission follows from that row.

What we built for a design-build company

White Shovel Landscapes is a landscape design-build company in North Alabama. Its sale runs through intake, design and a salesperson before a crew ever arrives. We built their operations software, and commission is one part of it:

Clients come in directly, and designers hand designs off in-house through simple forms.
A two-step commission program built for cash flow: part paid at sale, the remainder at close.
Commissions compiled automatically, from the same records that run the jobs.
Crews clock in on jobs, and expense cards route every transaction to its project, so each job carries its own costs.

The percentages and the rules are theirs. What we built is the machinery that works them out from the job's own records.

If you want this built around your plan: Angry Keyboard builds software around how your business already works. We bid the job, with one written estimate before any money moves. What we build, you own, and nobody is billed per seat.