Tiered Commission Formulas in Excel 365: Why VLOOKUP Gets It Wrong

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, real talk: if you’ve ever built a commission plan, a bulk-discount schedule or a tax provision in Excel, you’ve probably written this exact formula — a VLOOKUP against a tier table. It looks confident. It returns a nice, clean number. And that number is quietly, cheerfully wrong, because it slaps one rate on the entire amount instead of giving each slice of it the rate it actually earned. Sales ops, RevOps and finance folks run into this all the time and don’t even notice, because the formula never errors out — it just over- or underpays and smiles about it.

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Tiered Commission Formulas in Excel 365: Why VLOOKUP Gets It Wrong