Should I even track customer orders?
You can track customer orders (sometimes called Sales Orders or Purchase Orders) before you receive commissions for them in Repfabric for several reasons:
- To make sure you are paid the correct commission amounts for every order you receive from your customers
- To make sure you have enough orders this month to guarantee good commission checks in future months (to track your order backlog)
- To mirror orders submitted by your customers so your sales teams are knowledgeable on their current business
- To offer customer service if you keep your orders updated with current shipment information (your customers call you to find out if an order shipped for instance)
And several others. However, tracking orders requires input into Repfabric, which can be accomplished through the email add-in, order entry screens in the web portal or through integration to your ERP/warehouse system. In all but the last case, human entry is required.
Before you start, answer these questions:
Is obtaining the benefit above worth the energy it takes to enter those orders?
Does your manufacturer, customers or product line send you current order information such as copies of the orders themselves, order acknowledgements, or a booking report?
The answer to both of these questions must be “yes” for the order module to be useful to you and your sales people. Please continue below.
Your Company Business Process
The first step to get started is to define your process for entering and reconciling orders against commissions received. Because every manufacturer/product line gives you different information, your process may vary depending on what information you receive from each of them. There are three different options depending upon what is most important to you. Please choose the process that applies to you and follow it’s linked detailed Tutorial below it’s picture.
Option 1: Order Entry without Reconciling to Invoices/Commissions (Order Tracking Unreconciled)
This option is ideal for situations where you just want to make sure you have at least $2M in orders every month, but don’t care or have enough information to match those orders to the invoices and the paid commissions you receive. You know however, that as long as you have at least $2M in orders every month, future commission checks will be large enough to continue running the business. The energy to reconcile the orders to received invoices and commissions is too high to be worth it however (or your invoice information does not contain the PO you are being paid for so you cannot reconcile it anyway).
What you receive for a specific manufacturer/product line:
Order copies, order acknowledgements or a list of booked orders that is not usually a comprehensive list of all orders your manufacturer/product line received, as some may have gone direct to the manufacturer/product line without your knowledge.
What you do not receive:
- Invoices with PO numbers to match to previously recorded orders
- Enough time to enter the orders and invoices that match to them
Again, this process is used only for manufacturer/product lines where you want the confidence that the business is sustaining itself, but you cannot reconcile to invoices later on. You just want a backlog of orders received this month for example.
Please see Order Tracking (Unreconciled) tutorial.
Option 2: Progressive Order Tracking
This option should be used when entering an order, entering the invoices against those orders before you get paid, and the payments of commissions against those invoices. This is the ideal “downflow” that follows common order to shipment to commission payment process. You will have backlog reports that build based upon projected shipment dates, and allow you to project future commissions on a per order basis very accurately. It can be used to make sure you are paid on every order and invoice received within your territory.
What you receive for a specific manufacturer/product line:
- Order copies, order acknowledgements or a list of booked orders before you receive invoices or commission payments. If it is not a comprehensive list of all orders your manufacturer/product line received, you can at least reconcile the ones you know about. The order number, date, $ value and customer must be known at minimum.
- Invoices or shipment acknowledgements with order numbers they match to. Without a common document link through the purchase order or sales order number, those invoices cannot be matched to the orders that generated them. These invoices can be an e-readable listing or individual copies (to be entered by hand).
Note: If you plan to track line items at the order level, you must also track them at the line item level at the invoice. Or if you track the order at the header only level, you can only track invoices at the header level as well or they will not match.
Progressive order tracking is the ideal process to use when you have copies of orders, invoices, or commission payments in non-electronic formats that need to be entered by hand.
Please see the tutorial Progressive Order Tracking for detailed instructions.
Option 3: Order Auto-reconciliation using Match & Ship
This option should be used when you enter an order, and later receive invoice (sales) and commission at the same time in electronic format. This “downflow” allows the Repfabric system to automatically match invoices you’ve imported to orders you’ve previously entered into the system. You will have backlog reports that build based upon projected shipment dates, and allow you to project future commissions on a per order basis very accurately. It can be used to make sure you are paid on every order and invoice received within your territory.
What you receive for a specific manufacturer/product line:
- Order copies, order acknowledgements or a list of booked orders before you receive invoices or commission payments. If it is not a comprehensive list of all orders your manufacturer/product line received, you can at least reconcile the ones you know about. The order number, date, $ value and customer must be known at minimum.
- Invoices or shipment acknowledgements with order numbers they match to. Without a common document link through the purchase order or sales order number, those invoices cannot be matched to the orders that generated them. These invoices should be e-readable (csv or excel sheet) that can be imported via the import transactions menu path.
Note: Like option 2, if you plan to track line items at the order level, you must also track them at the line item level at the invoice. Or if you track the order at the header only level, you can only track invoices at the header level as well or they will not match.
Order Auto-reconciliation is the ideal process to use when you have copies of orders, invoices and commission payments arriving at the same time in electronic format, saving you the time of not logging into every order and shipping it by hand as in Option 2: Progressive Order tracking.
Please see the tutorial Order Auto-reconciliation for detailed instructions.
Optionally enabling Spec, Origin and Destination Commission Percentages (%s)
In order to project commissions accurately, sometimes your commission credit is split because of
- Order Origin – where the customer places the order
- Order Destination – where the order ships to
- Order Specification – the end customer that specified your components in the order
You can enable the manufacturer-specific commission percentages that can be chosen when creating the order in Repfabric to accurately control the percentage of commission earned for this order based on Origin, Specification, and Destination to very accurately project the correct commission earned.
For example, if your manufacturer/product line pays you 3% on Specification, 2% on Origination, and 2% on Destination, your maximum commission percentage you can earn for any order is 7%. However, if on this particular order, you are being paid only because it ships into your territory (Destination), you can select Destination during order entry and the projected commission will include only the Destination projected commission of 2%.
This feature is most useful in industries such as food equipment, large capital equipment, and splits tracking in electronics if you track orders.
Please see the tutorial Projecting Commissions for Spec, Origin and Destination Credits.
Enabling Commission Defaults
Each manufacturer or product line can have unique commission defaults so that during order entry, you do not need to manually enter commission percentages. This saves time and complexity so that you don’t have to remember line-specific commission percentages while entering the order to project that order’s earned commission.
Please see the tutorial Setting Up Commission Defaults for instructions.