Xactly

February 19, 2026

If your Xactly sales planning environment feels unreliable, slow, or increasingly difficult to operate, resolving the tension in your IT environment is likely top of mind.

Bringing in specialists to conduct a Technical Health Check (THC) is widely considered the most effective way to identify and tackle where your IT infrastructure is experiencing system failure. However, not every Xactly sales management user with system performance issues needs a professional technology health check.

If you're in a place where processes are heavier, workarounds are common, and the team quietly adapts to manual processes to sustain business goals, your IT environment is a source of risk rather than an area of control.

The question isn't: should you fix your Xactly infrastructure? At this point, you should ask:

Do we need a Technical Health Check (THC)? And is it actually worth it?

This article breaks down the real costs and benefits of a Technical Health Check for problematic Xactly infrastructure, including who typically needs one, what determines ROI, and when a THC is not the right next step.

What a Technical Health Check Is

How to Tell If You Need a Technical Health Check For Xactly

In Short: Who Does (and Doesn't) Need An IT Health Check?

How Much Does a Technical Health Check Cost?

The Benefits of a Technical Health Check (and Where the ROI Comes From)

High vs. Low ROI Technical Health Checks

Who Should Conduct a Technical Health Check?

What Is a Technical Health Check (THC)?

A Technical Health Check is a structured assessment of your current IT systems from a third-party service provider, designed to answer one core question: Is the system configured and operating in a way that supports accurate, scalable, audit-safe operations?

In the case of an Xactly-specific technology health check, a team of experts who specialize in implementing, configuring, troubleshooting, and maintaining Xactly's sales performance infrastructure will scour your system to pinpoint the root causes of your solution performance issues.

A technology health check is not a simple platform evaluation or repair service. It also isn’t just someone logging in, clicking around, and giving vague feedback about “best practices.”

A real Technical Health Check is meant to be diagnostic. It’s a way to identify what is happening in the system today, why it’s happening, and what that means for your ability to operate incentive compensation at scale.

Depending on your specific concerns, a typical IT health check will examine areas like:

Core configuration and plan logic

Data model and calculation performance

Integration architecture and data flows

Workflow and operational dependencies (especially on Sales Ops)

Reporting accuracy and audit readiness

IT environment governance and release management

Security vulnerabilities or risk areas that could cause overpayments, underpayments, or disputes

If you are working with the right IT systems experts, at the end of the process, the output is actionable, meaning it identifies what’s broken, why it’s broken, and what options exist to fix it.

Who Needs a Technical Health Check For Xactly?

Not every Xactly Corp customer needs an IT Health Check. But those who are experiencing consistent growing pains are good candidates for operational sales management professional services.

Contrary to popular opinion, the difference between a healthy environment and a failing one isn't controlled by the age of your Xactly infrastructure. While time is certainly a factor, real differentiators are complexity, trust, and operational strain.

In other words, it’s less about whether your Xactly environment is old and more about whether your organization has outgrown the way your intelligent revenue platform was originally built.

Here are the 14 most common factors that determine whether a IT health check is likely to be worth the investment.

1: System Trust Has Eroded (Even If It Still “Works”)

This is the biggest indicator, and it’s also the one organizations are often slowest to recognize. Even in a scenario where poor software configurations are bleeding your company dry, Xactly can still be producing statements. Commissions can still be getting paid. Payroll can still be going out.

And yet, patch management is out of control, error messages are constant, processing time is endless, and analytics tools are untrustworthy at best.

Incentive compensation systems aren’t just about calculation. They’re about trust. If reps don’t trust their statements, or if Finance doesn’t trust payout accuracy, the system is no longer doing its job — even if it’s technically “working.”

This is usually what it looks like:

Disputes are frequent and normalized
Reps rely on shadow spreadsheets
Finance performs manual validation every cycle
Sales leadership doesn’t use incentive data for decisions

When trust collapses, the cost isn’t just time. It’s motivation, behavior, and revenue execution.

2: Sales Ops Has Become the System

In a healthy Xactly environment, Sales Ops runs the process. In a broken environment, Sales Ops becomes the process.

This is one of the clearest indicators that your environment has crossed a threshold.

Instead of managing incentive operations, your team is doing everything around them: pulling reports that should already exist, rebuilding logic in spreadsheets just to validate what the system is calculating, creating manual adjustments that shouldn’t be necessary, and spending hours investigating issues you shouldn’t be dealing with.

Over time, Sales Ops becomes the translator between Sales Teams, Finance, and IT—the human layer of validation—and the buffer between the rep population and a commission calculations system they don’t trust.

At this point, Xactly isn’t reducing operational load. It’s creating it.

3: Complexity Has Outgrown the Original Architecture

Many Xactly environments were built to support the company you were two or three years ago. But businesses change faster than sales performance management comp systems.

Maybe you have more products. Maybe you’ve acquired new entities. Maybe your sales model has evolved. Maybe the company has grown, and the comp plans have grown with it.

It’s not unusual for an organization to start with a relatively straightforward model, then layer on:

new territories and overlays
more exception handling
more Finance controls
more complex crediting logic
more integration touchpoints

Over time, what was once manageable becomes fragile. And the system starts behaving less like infrastructure and more like a complicated set of workarounds.

4: You’ve Had Multiple Admins, Partners, or “Fixes” Over the Years

This is extremely common, and it’s not a criticism. It’s just reality.

Xactly Incent is a long-lifecycle platform. Many organizations have had different internal admins over time, different consulting partners, and different “quick fixes” implemented under deadline pressure.

Sometimes those changes are thoughtful. Sometimes they’re tactical. Sometimes they’re necessary.

But over the years, that history can create an environment that’s inconsistent, hard to maintain, and difficult to troubleshoot. In many cases, the problem isn’t that anyone did a bad job; it’s that the environment no longer has a cohesive architecture.

Software health checks become valuable when you suspect the system has accumulated technical debt, and no one is fully confident in what’s under the hood anymore.

5: You’re Facing a Trigger Event

Some organizations get by for years until something forces the issue.

Trigger events are often what bring a technical health check and remediation work on your incentive compensation management software from “nice to have” to absolutely necessary.

Common examples include:

A new CFO
A failed audit or escalating audit scrutiny
A compensation plan redesign
A major acquisition
A new ERP or CRM integration
A shift to usage-based or consumption pricing
A sales org restructure

When a trigger event is coming, the cost of finding out too late skyrockets.

6: Calculation Runs Are Slow, Unpredictable, or Fail Under Load

When Xactly Incent is healthy, calculation cycles are repeatable. The team knows what to expect, how long it will take, and what a normal run looks like.

In an unhealthy commission's IT system, calculation becomes a black box. Runs take longer than they should, performance fluctuates without a clear explanation, and processing becomes increasingly sensitive to data volume.

This is often one of the earliest technical signs of underlying issues, especially as the organization grows. It’s also one of the most expensive issues to ignore, because calculation instability tends to create downstream manual work, cycle delays, and last-minute scrambling.

7: The Data Model Has Become Overly Complex (or Internally Inconsistent)

A surprising number of Xactly issues don’t start with the comp plan. They start with the data. When the Xactly data model has evolved without a clear architecture, you often see things like:

multiple ways to represent the same business concept
redundant fields and “shadow” objects
objects created for short-term sales compensation fixes that never got cleaned up
inconsistent naming conventions that hinder operational efficiencies
logic embedded in places it shouldn’t live

The result is that the system becomes harder to understand, harder to maintain, and harder to troubleshoot, even for experienced admins. At this point, every new plan change becomes riskier, because no one is fully confident about what else it might break.

8: Integrations Are Brittle, Manual, or Depend on “Hero Knowledge"

Incentive compensation is never solely confined to Xactly. Your incentive and commission management infrastructure likely includes Xactly, CRM data, ERP data, HR data, territory data, product data, and often a handful of operational spreadsheets that haven't yet been migrated.

When integrations are healthy, data flows are consistent, monitored, and documented. When integrations are unhealthy, the system depends on manual uploads, fragile scripts, or one person who knows how to make everything work.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “Don’t touch that file; only Brian knows how it works,” you already know the problem. A technical health check is especially valuable when integrations have grown organically, and the organization can no longer explain, end to end, how the data gets into Xactly and how it’s validated.

9: You’re Constantly Debugging the Same Scenarios Every Pay Cycle

One of the clearest indicators of technical debt is repetition.

If the team is investigating the same payout scenarios month after month in your Xactly Incent Suite, you don't have a people problem; it's a solution performance issue. The system has structural flaws that keep reappearing when:

logic is layered instead of redesigned
exception handling becomes permanent
plan changes are patched in under the deadline
workarounds become standard operating procedure

A comprehensive health check on your IT infrastructure helps identify which recurring issues are symptoms and which are the root cause.

10: Plan Logic Has Become Fragile, Layered, or Too Dependent on Exceptions

There’s a difference between “complex” and “fragile.” Many organizations have legitimately complex comp plans. Xactly can handle that when the logic is designed correctly.

Where environments tend to break down is when plan logic evolves through layers of fixes rather than deliberate redesign. Over time, you end up with a structure where:

changes require multiple edits across different components
exceptions are used to handle normal scenarios
the team is afraid to touch logic because it might break something else
plan behavior becomes hard to explain, even internally

When logic becomes fragile, every plan change becomes risky. And incentive compensation should never be a high-risk system.

11: Reporting Doesn’t Tie Out Cleanly Without Manual Reconciliation

This one is especially important for Finance, but it’s fundamentally technical. If standard reporting outputs cannot be reconciled to source-of-truth numbers without manual work, that usually indicates:

data alignment issues
inconsistent modeling
calculation logic gaps
integration timing problems
incomplete audit trail design

A healthy environment should produce results that can be traced, explained, and reconciled without heroic effort. If reporting only “works” when someone builds a spreadsheet to make it work, the platform is not functioning as controlled infrastructure.

12: Auditability Exists in Theory, Not in Practice

Most Xactly Corp customers believe they have auditability because the platform is designed to support it. But auditability isn’t a feature you automatically get just by being in Xactly.

Auditability is something you have to design into the environment: clear source-of-truth data, traceable logic, consistent calculation processes, controlled change management, and clean documentation.

If audits repeatedly become stressful, or if the team has to reconstruct logic after the fact, it's a surefire sign you need a health check to help identify where audit trails and governance have broken down in your IT system.

13: Governance and Change Management Are Weak (or Nonexistent)

This is one of the least glamorous parts of Xactly, and one of the most important. When IT systems are stable, it’s usually because changes are controlled. There’s a process for plan updates, testing, deployment, and validation.

When environments are unstable, changes are often made under pressure, without consistent testing or documentation. Over time, the system becomes unpredictable, not because Xactly is unreliable, but because the environment is being operated without guardrails.

Bringing in specialist IT support solutions providers for a THC is often the fastest way to reintroduce governance and improve solution performance without forcing a full rebuild.

14: Your IT Environment Has “Institutional Knowledge Risk”

This is a technical risk that often gets missed because it appears to be a people problem. If your Xactly sales planning environment depends on one or two people who know how it works, the system is fragile, even if it’s producing correct results today.

This is especially risky when:

there is little documentation
only one person understands integrations
only one person understands the plan's logic
the organization has turnover risk
key stakeholders are approaching burnout

An IT health check doesn’t just find issues; it also identifies opportunities. It creates visibility and structure that reduces dependency on institutional knowledge and increases user adoption.

Who Does (and Doesn’t) Need a Technical Health Check?

A Technical Health Check is not something every Xactly customer should do automatically.

In many organizations, Xactly is working exactly as intended. The system is stable, the team is operating efficiently, and comp outcomes are trusted. While the odd issue might crop up every once in a while, there are no consistent, recurring problems. In those cases, a THC may be unnecessary, and it may not generate meaningful ROI. Simple asset management or repair services from your internal IT resources are sufficient.

But for organizations that are experiencing consistent operational strain, rising disputes, increasing manual work, or technical instability, a THC can be one of the highest-leverage investments you can make. It helps restore incentive compensation to what it should be: controlled infrastructure that scales with the business.

Still not sure where you fall? Let's take a closer look:

Who Doesn’t Need a Technical Health Check

You likely do not need an expert review from a THC provider if your environment is stable, your pay cycles are predictable, and your organization trusts the outputs.

You may not need a health check if the primary issues you’re experiencing aren't technical. For example, if the comp plan itself is misaligned, overly complex, or constantly changing without governance, a technical assessment won’t solve the root cause.

Finally, if your organization is not prepared to act on findings, whether due to budget, leadership alignment, or internal capacity, a THC can become a report that sits on a shelf, even if it’s accurate.

Who Does Need a Technical Health Check

A THC is typically worth the investment when the organization has reached a point where incentive compensation is creating operational cost, payout risk, or trust erosion, and when leadership is ready to stabilize the environment.

In practice, the strongest candidates for a technical health check are organizations where Sales Ops has become the system, where Finance has lost confidence in payout accuracy, where disputes are increasing, and where technical complexity has outgrown the original architecture.

If your team is spending more time validating, correcting, and explaining commissions than actually running compensation operations, the system is already telling you what you need to know. A Technical Health Check is simply the structured way to confirm it and map the most realistic path forward.

What Are The Costs of a Technical Health Check?

In some cases, organizations choose to expand the scope beyond the technical review to include a broader process assessment (for example, evaluating how compensation operations are run across teams, systems, and workflows).

When these service expansions are included, pricing can vary depending on the size and complexity of the organization—and whether we’re assessing compensation only, or additional related processes as well.

While this provides you with a general estimate, it's only part of the equation. A THC isn’t just something you “buy.” It’s something your organization participates in. And, as with most diagnostic work, the ROI depends heavily on how prepared you are to use the results.

Here's a more comprehensive breakdown of costs:

Cost #1: The External Services Investment

The most obvious cost is the engagement itself.

A meaningful technical health check requires skilled Xactly specialists, not just general SPM experience, because the root causes often live in the technical details: calculation logic design, data model structure, integration strategy, and operational workflow design.

There are different levels of THC depth. A lightweight THC can identify surface-level issues quickly. A deeper THC costs more, but produces outputs that are far more actionable.

Both can be valid, but they solve different problems.

Cost #2: Internal Time and Attention

Even the best THC cannot be performed in a vacuum.

Internal stakeholders will need to spend time supporting discovery sessions, sharing documentation, walking through payroll cycles, validating data flows, and reviewing sample payout scenarios.

This is where some THCs fail, not because the technical work is wrong, but because the organization underestimated how much internal context is required to diagnose the right issues.

If your team is already overwhelmed, this internal cost is real, and it should be included in the analysis.

Cost #3: Short-Term Disruption

A technical health check doesn’t typically disrupt payroll cycles directly, but it does introduce a new type of work.

It requires stakeholders to slow down enough to answer technical questions, revisit assumptions, and sometimes confront the fact that the system they've been relying on isn’t doing what people think it is.

For some organizations, that disruption is productive. For others, it can feel like added pressure during an already strained period.

Cost #4: The Hidden Cost of What Happens Next

This is the most important cost to acknowledge:

A THC is only valuable if the organization is willing to act on the findings. A well-run THC will surface root causes, risk areas, and remediation paths. But it cannot create alignment. It cannot create a budget. It cannot force change.

If leadership wants answers but doesn’t want remediation work, the THC becomes a document that sits in a folder while the same problems continue.

That doesn’t mean the THC was wrong. It means the organization wasn’t ready.

The Benefits of a Technical Health Check (and Where the ROI Comes From)

Ultimately, to do the math properly, you need to factor in both costs and returns to get your ROI. This is where the analysis gets interesting. The value of a technical health check is in reduced risk, stabilized payout operations, and restored trust in incentive compensation.

Here are the most meaningful benefit categories, including the measurable ones and the harder-to-quantify ones that are often more impactful.

Benefit #1: Reduced Overpayments and Leakage

In broken incentive systems, overpayments are more common than most organizations realize. Not because anyone is trying to game the system, but because manual adjustments, exceptions, and poorly governed plan logic tend to skew in the rep’s favor over time.

This is especially true when Sales Ops is under pressure to get payroll out, and the system isn’t producing reliable results on its own.

A THC helps uncover issues like:

incorrect rate tables

double-crediting scenarios

unbounded accelerators

exception logic that never got cleaned up

plan changes layered on top of old logic

Even a small percentage of leakage can represent significant dollars, especially in larger rep populations.

Benefit #2: Lower Operational Cost Per Pay Cycle

Most teams don’t measure this, but it’s one of the clearest ROI levers.

A healthy Xactly environment should reduce the time spent on manual reconciliation, dispute investigations, spreadsheet validation, statement explanations, and rework caused by late plan changes.

When the system is broken, those hours quietly become “normal.” People stop noticing how much effort is being burned just to keep commissions moving.

A technical health check can quantify where time is being lost and why, and identify which fixes will actually reduce workload rather than simply shift it.

Benefit #3: Faster Close, Cleaner Accruals, Better Finance Confidence

Finance teams care about Xactly for a simple reason: Commissions hit the P&L.

If payouts are unpredictable, late, or constantly adjusted after the fact, Finance loses confidence in accrual accuracy, forecasting, quarter-close timelines, and auditability.

Even if commissions are “close enough,” the lack of control creates downstream friction. A THC can produce measurable improvements in financial governance, even if the sales org is the loudest stakeholder.

Benefit #4: Improved Rep Trust and Motivation

This benefit is real, but hard to quantify. That said, most sales leaders recognize the second-order effects when reps don’t trust commissions:

They stop chasing the right behaviors. They spend time doing their own calculations. They disengage from comp as a motivator. They escalate disputes aggressively.

When incentives are unclear, performance drops, even if you can’t tie it neatly to a single metric. One of the most underappreciated benefits of fixing incentive infrastructure is simply restoring confidence that effort will be rewarded correctly.

Benefit #5: Reduced Compliance and Audit Risk

If your organization is public, regulated, or simply under heavier audit scrutiny, a THC can prevent major pain. Incentive compensation touches financial reporting accuracy, broker compensation controls, and, in many organizations, SOX controls.

A technical health check can identify gaps before they become audit findings.

Benefit #6: A Clear Path Forward (Instead of Guessing)

This benefit is hard to quantify, but it’s huge. Organizations often know something is wrong, but they aren't sure if:

whether it’s configuration, integrations, or process

whether they need optimization or reimplementation

whether the problem is Xactly or the upstream data

whether the issue is technical debt or plan design

A technical health check replaces guesswork with clarity. And clarity reduces wasted spending.

What Makes a THC High-ROI vs Low-ROI?

A THC tends to be high-ROI when the environment is materially broken, payroll cycles consume significant manual effort, leadership is prepared to fund remediation, and there are real payout errors or audit concerns.

It also tends to be high-ROI when the organization is growing or restructuring, because incentive infrastructure that is “barely holding together” rarely survives the next major change.

A THC tends to be low-ROI when the organization only wants validation, not change, or when there is no capacity to act on findings.

It’s also low-ROI when the problem is primarily compensation strategy, not infrastructure. A THC won’t fix a comp plan that is misaligned, overly complex, or incentivizing the wrong behaviors. That’s a governance issue, not a technical one.

Who Should Conduct a Technical Health Check?

A technical health check is only useful if the assessor has sufficient depth to identify real root causes and sufficient independence to be honest about what they find.

There are three main options:

Option 1: Your Internal Team

This can work if you have a highly experienced Xactly admin, strong technical documentation, and enough time and authority to challenge existing assumptions.

The biggest downside is that internal teams are often too close to the system. They may know it deeply, but they may not have seen enough environments to recognize deeper structural issues, or to confidently recommend the best remediation path.

Option 2: Vendor Services

Vendor-led THCs can be valuable, particularly when the issues are known and isolated, and the goal is to validate platform-specific best practices.

However, vendor teams may not always take responsibility for messy real-world integrations, upstream data problems, or operational design. In many organizations, those are the exact areas where the biggest risks live.

Option 3: A Specialized Boutique Implementation Partner

This is often the best fit when the environment is deeply customized, has evolved over multiple years, or is showing signs of technical debt.

A specialized partner is also more likely to provide remediation-ready recommendations: meaning prioritized fixes, realistic effort estimates, and a path forward that doesn’t automatically require a full rebuild.

In other words, a specialist technical health check provider will do more than just uncover what’s wrong, but also describe what you should do next, and why.

Learn the secret to saving on software projects here

The Bottom Line: When a THC Is Worth It

A Technical Health Check is worth the investment when your Xactly environment is producing measurable operational cost, payout risk, or trust erosion, and when leadership is prepared to act on the results.

It’s not worth it when the system is healthy, when the organization is not prepared for remediation, or when the core issues are unrelated to infrastructure.

What Are Your Next Steps?

Once you’ve identified where the system is failing, the next question is: What’s the tangible value of fixing it?

Many organizations underestimate the operational and financial impact of misaligned incentive structures. Lost quota, overpayments, and reduced rep motivation often go unmeasured until they compound.

Canidium’s Xactly specialists help Sales and Finance teams model the expected gains from system improvements, accounting for complexity, adoption, and cross-functional dependencies. Our goal is to help you understand what preparation and planning are required to implement changes successfully, and whether a Technical Health Check is the right first step.

Learn more about the implementation process here.

What Is a Technical Health Check (THC)?

Depending on your specific concerns, a typical IT health check will examine areas like:

Who Needs a Technical Health Check For Xactly?

Who Does (and Doesn’t) Need a Technical Health Check?