What a spreadsheet is
A sheet with one row per booking, columns for expected and received commission, a formula for the difference, and a filter. Sometimes a second tab per supplier and a third for claims. Maintained by whoever has time. Host Agency Reviews on commissions
Side by side
| Aspect | Spreadsheet | MarginShield |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | From $149 a month |
| Time to set up | An hour | A trial and one file |
| Arithmetic | Floating point; 0.1 + 0.2 is not 0.3 | Exact decimals from file to export |
| Currencies | Whatever the formula does | Never combined, never converted |
| A payment covering many bookings | Manual allocation | Per-booking received amounts, summed per booking |
| Two people editing | Two versions | One record with an audit trail |
| Which supplier owes most | Pivot table, rebuilt monthly | On the dashboard |
| Claims and recovery status | A column, if someone remembers | Cases with claimed, partial and recovered amounts |
| History | Last year’s file, if it was kept | Every import, forever, exportable |
Choose a spreadsheet if
- You book fewer than a few dozen commissionable bookings a month, with one or two suppliers, in one currency.
- One person does it, every month, without fail. Some agencies have that person.
Choose MarginShield if
- A supplier payment routinely covers many bookings and you allocate it by hand.
- More than one currency, or more than one person, touches the sheet.
- You have ever found a formula that had been pasted over, and wondered how long ago.
Or both
MarginShield reads an export, so it sits beside whatever you use to book. Several agencies will keep their CRM or their sheet for the day-to-day and run the audit separately, monthly, from an export. The other comparisons: Sion and Tern. The guide explains the method whichever you pick.