Custom software & automation case study
Dropzone is an internal commission calculation, payroll processing, and reporting platform built for a wealth management firm with a $1.5 billion capital footprint. It imports clearing-firm trade data, calculates representative compensation across a complex web of rates, partnerships, overrides, and expenses, and produces the payroll and retention reports the firm needs to run month-end.
Project facts
The problem
The firm's existing commission system was a legacy desktop application that cost $4,500 per month. It crashed frequently, required a dedicated specialist to operate, and forced the team to spend over an hour every day uploading daily trade files from their clearing firm and manually correcting errors in each submission.
Branch expenses arrived through informal emails and inconsistent spreadsheets. Compensation rules, representative rate exceptions, partnership allocations, and manager overrides lived in the specialist's head as much as in the system. If that person was unavailable, the monthly commission run was at risk.
The firm needed a web-based platform that could ingest clearing-firm files, apply the firm's compensation logic automatically, surface exceptions instead of hiding them, and produce payroll-ready output without depending on a single person's institutional knowledge.
What BlueSail built
Dropzone handles the full monthly commission lifecycle: file ingestion, trade-to-representative assignment, compensation calculation, exception resolution, payout approval, reconciliation, and report generation.
BlueSail built it as a complete replacement for the legacy desktop application. The platform gives the firm one web-based place to upload files, resolve exceptions, calculate compensation, approve payouts, reconcile monthly and daily data, and export payroll-ready reports.
The build
The engineering challenge
The hardest part of this build was not parsing the files. It was the nuances.
Brokerage compensation is full of small, specific rules that interact in ways a generic payroll system cannot anticipate. A representative might have a different rate for one period because of a temporary arrangement. A partnership might split revenue three ways with unequal shares before each member's individual rate applies. A manager's override income depends on the final gross revenue of every representative they supervise, which means it cannot be calculated until the first pass is complete.
Ticket charges follow tiered logic that behaves differently for small-gross and zero-gross cases. Cancellations and negative amounts need to flow through correctly without breaking downstream totals.
None of these rules are individually complex. But they all have to work together, correctly, for every representative, every period, without exception. The challenge was building a calculation engine flexible enough to absorb all of these adjustments while producing output the firm trusts enough to send to payroll.
This is exactly why the legacy system cost $4,500 a month and still required a specialist: the domain complexity is real, and generic tools cannot handle it without extensive manual intervention.
Technical stack
Dropzone is built on Next.js with React and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS, backed by Supabase PostgreSQL with row-level security, and authenticated through Supabase Auth. Financial columns use PostgreSQL fixed-precision numeric types.
File imports support direct upload and a private temporary storage bucket for larger files. Reports are generated as CSV and multi-sheet XLSX workbooks. The platform includes end-to-end test coverage across authentication, payout generation, report downloads, ADP export, and reconciliation workflows.
Current status
Dropzone is live and in daily production use. The firm uses it as its primary platform for commission calculation, payroll processing, and reporting.
What it replaced
BlueSail builds custom platforms that replace expensive, poorly fitting tools with software designed around your actual workflow.
