20+ comp plans. 60+ sellers. Payouts in 12 hours, not 40.

Hubilo grew 10.5x in 2021 and hired fast across roles and regions. Its Excel-based commission process depended on one person and could not support the plans the business needed. In October 2021, Hubilo moved to Visdum and cut payout time from 40 hours to 12.

01 · The company

Hubilo, an event-tech company that grew 10.5x in a year

Hubilo was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in San Francisco. It started as a virtual networking platform for event attendees and grew into a major player in event tech and hybrid events. Its customers include the United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens, Cognizant, Veritas Technologies, and GITEX.

In 2021, Hubilo grew 10.5x and raised $125 million in a Series B round, with plans to invest and expand into the US, UK, EU, and APAC. The company has 500+ employees.

02 · The trigger

Why Hubilo's Excel commission process could not keep up

As the business grew, hiring accelerated across roles, including SDRs, BDRs, CSMs, and PreSales, and across geographies. For Hubilo's Finance and Revenue Operations teams, handling complex sales compensation scenarios in Excel spreadsheets became increasingly difficult.

The scale of what the team was managing:

The master spreadsheet had complex, interconnected logic covering multiple roles, geographies, and a large team, and building it was a huge challenge. Splitting it into individual sheets for each payee was fraught with errors and inaccuracies, which often led to overpayments or disputes. Finance and sales teams lost time validating and resolving payout issues. Partners selling on Hubilo's behalf each had a custom commission plan, adding another layer of complexity.

Two risks made the problem more serious for finance. The entire computation process depended on one person in the finance team who fully understood the master sheet's macros and links. And to stay compliant with ASC 606 and IFRS 15, the team was capitalizing costs on sheets, producing amortization reports, and creating and posting journal entries by hand. That non-standard manual process was not audit friendly.

Plan design was limited too. Hubilo's expansion across regions called for advanced mechanisms such as team-based bonuses, multi-year spiffs, and accelerators. Those far exceeded what Excel could handle, which limited how flexible the comp plans could be and how well they aligned sales behavior.

03 · The evaluation

What Hubilo needed from a commission system

Hubilo's reasons for choosing Visdum over other options map directly to the problems above.

04 · The decision

The verdict

05 · The implementation

A full move to automated commissions in October 2021

In October 2021, Hubilo moved to a fully automated sales commission process with Visdum. The Salesforce integration replaced manual data entry, taking data retrieval, transformation, validation, and reconciliation out of Excel.

Commission statements are now created automatically in Visdum once earnings have been validated and approved, which addressed and streamlined the statement distribution problem.

The compliance piece: Visdum automatically capitalizes commission costs and produces detailed audit-ready reports and summarized journal entries, with no additional effort from the finance team. Hubilo is now fully ASC 606 compliant.

06 · What success looks like

End-to-end commission automation for a growing team

Hubilo now runs 20+ comp plan scenarios for 60+ reps across multiple roles and geographies on a fully automated system. Payout time dropped from 40 hours to 12, and the Operations team has saved hundreds of hours.

Complex comp plans are now more straightforward to design, so Hubilo can use advanced strategies when the business needs them, without implementation headaches. The dependency on one person for calculations is gone, and Visdum keeps the results consistently accurate.

Sales reps receive detailed commission breakdowns and have access to reports and analytics to monitor their deals. Sales leaders and managers have clear visibility into both the current and potential earnings of their teams, which they need for effective management and motivation.