Fixing a Multi-Level Incentive System (L1-L4) Without Breaking the Workflow

How I debugged and stabilized a hierarchical incentive system with approval, hold, and reporting logic across multiple roles.

This started as one of those systems that looked perfect on paper.

A 4-level incentive flow. L1 to L4. Each level approves, moves forward, everything clean.

Then I tested it with real scenarios.

Things didn't break completely. They just behaved… wrong in small ways.

That was worse.

The original goal

The idea was simple:

• L1 (Sales) creates incentives
• L2 (Team Lead) reviews
• L3 (Manager) reviews
• L4 (Owner) finalizes

Each level should:

• Only see items after the previous level approves
• Be blocked if something below is on hold
• Continue properly once things are reopened

Sounds straightforward.

It wasn't.

Where things went wrong

The biggest issue was this:

Database state and UI behavior were not aligned

Some examples:

• L2 could see items that L1 had not approved
• Holds were not properly blocking higher levels
• L3 and L4 were seeing items they should not touch
• Reports showed everything, even irrelevant states

Nothing was fully broken. But nothing was fully correct either.

The core realization

I was trusting raw database fields too much:

• status
• holdReason
• heldBy

Those values were technically correct, but not enough to represent the actual workflow.

So I introduced a derived layer:

Effective State

Effective State

Instead of using the row as-is, I compute what the state should be based on lower levels in the same sale.

Basic idea:

function computeEffectiveState(inc) {
const lowerHeld = checkLowerLevelHold(inc)

if (lowerHeld) {
  return {
    effectiveStatus: "ON_HOLD",
    effectiveHeldBy: lowerHeld.heldBy
  }
}

return {
    effectiveStatus: inc.status
  }
}