How to use Drawbridge
Drawbridge turns closed deals into commission payouts staged in Rippling. It never pays anyone. Every figure it shows can be traced back to the deals and the plan clause that priced it, and every change anyone makes is written down.
The journey a payout makes
Five steps, three of them requiring a person. The ticks are what you can do — Unidentified, holding no roles.
| Step | Who | What happens | You? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Drawbridge | Reads closed-won and churned deals from the CRM, matches each deal owner to a Rippling worker, and prices them against the plan. Nothing is sent anywhere. | — |
| 2 | A comp admin | Checks the derivation on each line and approves it. Approving changes nothing in Rippling — it records that a person agreed with the number. | no |
| 3 | A comp admin | Writes the approved payout into Rippling as a DRAFT. Money still has not moved; the draft sits in Rippling waiting for a payroll admin. | no |
| 4 | A payroll admin | Submits the draft into the upcoming pay run. This is the irreversible step, and it is deliberately a different person from the one who approved it. | no |
| 5 | Rippling | Pays it, on its own schedule, as part of the normal payroll run. | — |
Nobody can approve, stage or submit their own commission, whatever roles they hold. Rejecting your own line is allowed — it can only ever reduce what you are paid.
Running a pay period
- Open Commission drafts. If a banner says the roster is stale, sync before you approve anything — a stale roster is how a departed worker keeps earning. This deployment calls it stale after 24 hours.
- Read a line you do not expect. Every row shows its derivation: the deals, the attainment, and the plan clause that set the rate. If the derivation is wrong, the plan is wrong — fix the plan, do not adjust the number.
- Approve the lines you agree with. A line carrying a warning cannot be approved until the warning is resolved.
- Write the approved lines to Rippling. They arrive as drafts, visible to your payroll team inside Rippling.
- A payroll admin submits them into the pay run. That step is final, and Drawbridge will not let the person who approved a line be the one who submits it.
When it says something you did not expect
Drawbridge refuses rather than guesses, so most surprises are it telling you something. The four you are most likely to meet:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| An empty run, with an explanation | Not “nobody earned anything”. Drawbridge could not read something it needs and is refusing to show a zero that looks like a fact. The message names what. |
| “Could not reach Rippling” | A connection problem on our side. Nothing was written. Retrying is safe. |
| “Rippling refused Drawbridge’s access” | Rippling answered and declined the credential — usually the app’s access was changed or revoked there. Waiting will not fix it; someone reconnects it in Rippling. |
| A refusal naming a store it could not write | Nothing changed. Drawbridge records a change before making it, so a store it cannot write is a change that does not happen. |
What Drawbridge will not do
- Pay anyone. It stages drafts. Releasing money happens in Rippling, by a payroll admin.
- Change a number you disagree with. There is no override field. A wrong figure means a wrong plan, and the plan is the thing to change — which is recorded, and frozen once a period has been approved against it.
- Act on its own. The assistant can do only what the person using it could do, asks before anything that moves money, and every action it takes is logged with the words that asked for it.
- Convert currencies. Plans pay in their own currency and Rippling’s payout body requires US dollars, so anything else is reported rather than converted at a rate nobody chose.
Everything anyone did is written to an action log. Your roles do not include reading it; an auditor or owner can.
You hold 0 permissions. Roles come from your Rippling supergroups and are re-read on every request, so a change there takes effect here immediately.