Adding agencies to your accounts gives you the chance to reach a wider region, expand your sales and grow your business fast.
Uphance makes it easy to add agents to your account, manage them efficiently, and generate commission reports for each agent on the fly.
Think of these agents as sales reps.
In this document, we will show you how to add agents to your account and manage them.
An Overview of Agents
As we mentioned earlier, agents are sales reps responsible for generating sales for your business and improving business relationships with your customers. You only get to pay them when they bring in a sale (except if you agreed otherwise).
To access your agents or add one, simply navigate to Settings >> Agencies
Note: While they are called agents by default, you can choose to call them whatever you want. For example, rather than agents, you can call them sales reps, stylists, etc.
To change the naming, navigate to Settings >> Terminology >> Agent labels
But for this documentation, we will stick to Agents
How to Add an Agent
To add an agent to your account, navigate to Settings >> Agents once again. Then click the + icon and follow through the process as illustrated below:
Upon clicking the Create Agents button, you will automatically be redirected to the Agent configuration page.
This is where you get to set the agent's commission percentage, commission period, sales target, etc.
After adding agents, the next thing you will want to do is to give them access to your account. That way, they can log into your system to create sales orders and shipments for customers assigned to them.
To do so, navigate to Settings >> Users. Create a user and assign it to the agent you just added as shown below:
Upon adding, the agent will receive an email invitation to join your organization. It looks something like this:
All they need to do now is click the link and create an account.
Managing Agent Access
When you add an agent to your organization, there are certain features they can't access and some others they can access by default.
The features they can access by default are as follows:
Dashboard: They can only view the sales they generated on their dashboard, and nothing more.
Product Information: They can only view products, and create and view line sheets. But they can't update product information.
Customer Relationship: Your agents can interact with customers just in the same way as you can as the business owner. The only exception is that they can't view showroom overviews.
Order Management: Agents can create sales orders, view sales, view invoices (you will have to enable this), access shipment pages, and view returns.
Reports: Agents can access current inventory levels, available & available from stock, shipments, and sales commission reports.
Sales Orders: Agents can download sales orders exclusive only to them as CSV/Excel
Download Sales Commission Report: Agents can download their sales commission reports as PDF.
If you noticed, Inventory Management and Production/Purchasing are not on this list. Another thing to note is that you can always disable some of the features listed above. To do so, open the agent profile you are after and alter the access permission as shown below:
How to Assign an Agent to a Pricing Channel
Would you like to set an agent to only access your Wholesale Pricing or a specific pricing channel? That's a straightforward process.
All you have to do is open the agent and the user assigned to the profile and assign it to the channel you have in mind.
How to Assign an ID to an Agent
After you've added agents to your organization account, you can assign an ID to them. Doing so makes it easy to track the sales they bring in for your business from Shopify, allowing you to process their commissions quickly and easily.
To assign an ID to an agent, simply input a unique ID in the Agent ID field as shown below:
How to Generate Sales Agent Reports
Uphance enables you to generate reports for each agent based on projected sales, invoices created, and sales commissions.
To generate these reports, simply click the Reports tab and select the type of report you want to run.
You have the option of emailing the report straight to the agent by simply clicking the Email button.
How to Assign a Customer to an Agent
Assigning a customer to an agent gives that agent full access to the customer. This means the agent can edit the customer's contacts, create sales orders for the customer, generate payments and invoices, etc.
To assign an agent to a customer, navigate to Customer Relationships >> Customers. Open the customer, click Edit details and assign the agent as illustrated below.
Note: You can assign multiple agents to a customer. To do so, hold down the Ctrl (or Cmd) button on your keyboard and select the agents you wish to assign to the customer.
How to Assign All Customers to An Agent
Assigning customers individually to an agent can be somewhat cumbersome. As such, you might want to give your agents access to all your customers. To do so, simply check the Agent see all customers radio button.
How to Deactivate An Agent
To deactivate an agent, first, you need to locate the agent's user name. After that, deactivate it by unchecking the Active radio button, and Update it as illustrated below:
Assigning A Currency To Your Agents
Uphance allows you to assign currency for sales tracking to your agents, and you can do so as illustrated below:
Note: While you can assign different currencies to different agents, in theory, it isn't practicable as it would make it hard to calculate the total agents' commission. For this reason, we suggest assigning the same currency to all your agents.