Changing Commission Rate By Contact Plan

Changes to an Agency's Contingency Rate for one or more Clients are commonplace in the industry. The objective, at the operational level, is to accommodate the Client without a massive manual labor project that has everyone updating volumes of shelf inventory account by account. This is a process that can be automated with a Contact Plan to mass change all the Debtors under the affected Client in one pass through the inventory.

Background

When you enter new accounts from within the Debtors Tab in the Client Screen, the Rate field on each Debtor entered here will be auto-populated from the rate which currently exists on the Client. If there is no default rate entered into the Client Advanced Settings screen, this blank rate field will be passed along to Debtors as they are entered.

It is possible to override and overwrite a blank or default rate field on the Debtor screen as a new account is being entered if there is an exception reason why it would be necessary to be faced with this chore. For the majority of the business you will enter for any one Client, it shouldn't be necessary to be doing extra entry when the system is designed to save you steps.

There are a few commonplace Industry scenarios where you may find that you need to update significant portions of your inventory with a new commission rate or rate plan.

A Client who normally assigns Retail only at a rate of 35% will now be sending you listings for Commercial as well and you are to charge 45% on this stream of business. This creates a condition where the Type of assignment is becoming the determining factor in what will decision the correct rate to charge on each account.

Your Agency has made a business decision to change its contingency rate for all Clients who assign business of a specific Type, effective as of a designated date.

You have an individual Client with one or more Client numbers that has changed their rate as of a specified date and wants this change to be applied to shelf inventory retroactively in addition to what is being reflected as the current rate for new listings.

Commission Rate - Changing By Contact Plan

WARNING: We recommend taking a Snapshot of your database before embarking on any large-scale invasive auto-process. See File Maintenance topics.

The scenarios above which want a different rate entirely from the Client default for different reasons and based on Debtor account Type can be best handled by adding an Event to the NEW Contact (Action) Plan which tests for account Type and changes the commission rate on that basis from the default Client value for to the new prescribed rate for the account Type.

Using shipping defaults for example purposes, your Debtor Account Type pick list should look something like the following:

"0" You Can Add Your Own Types
"1" Retail
"2" Commercial
"3" Medical
"4" NSF_Account

Here are examples of the settings you would use on the inside of a Contact (Action) Plan to make the change on the basis of the account Type code.

Plan Event to set Commission Rate to 45%

This event runs if the Pick List 'Type' is 2. In this logic, the numeric representation of the expressed "Commercial" type is being tested for and if found to be true, ONLY then does the system update the commission rate on an account to 45%. Note as well that the fill value 45 is entered in the Description field with no percent sign or decimal points.

The following is another example of the same decisioning using a different 'Type' Pick List numeric to make the conditional logic test with.

Plan Event to set Commission Rate to 50%

This event runs if the 'Type' is 4, that is, for NSF_Account accounts, as shown in the Pick List choices above.

To determine what your numeric value is for your 'Type' pick list selection, Right click on the Type field and open the pick list by clicking into the field, then right-clicking. This will popup an Access Rights window. Next to the "Pick list file" field is a yellow folder. Click the folder to open the pick list and determine what numeric value in your site's pick list match the criteria you will be isolating by.

Adding an Event to your NEW account automation addresses part of the issue on a go forward basis. To run against the whole database to identify and isolate accounts for this treatment, you need to gather up the shelf inventory and if applicable, update all of their Commission Rates. If you are able to segregate on the basis of Client, like in #1 above, then this Tag List creation can be done from within a Client's Debtors tab. If you need to sweep all Clients for a specific 'Type', the best shelf inventory prospective will come from a Browse Active Debtors list.

The methodology is the same coming from a Client screen Debtors Tab or Browse Active Debtors list,

From the list, click Find. When the Search Criteria window pops up, select 'Type' and pick from the dropdown menu to populate your From / To columns with the target criterion.

Click Search in the lower right corner to Tag a list of qualifying accounts.

To properly gather your Tagged List, click Edit at the top of the screen, then View Tags (or View All) - whichever message your running version shows you for this purpose.

Create a new Contact Plan from the menu path "System\Contact\Management Settings\View Contact Plans" and input your Rate Change Event. This standalone Contact Plan will be run as a batch process against your shelf inventory meeting the target criteria for update.

To run the created Contact Plan against all the accounts in the tagged list, click "Tools\Batch Processing\ Run Contact Plans". Follow the prompts and select the Contact Plan designed for this purpose and run it.

When asked to Untag your list after the process completes, initially say NO so that you can spot-check a few to make sure the desired result was obtained.

After confirming that your rates on the target subset of accounts have updated correctly and successfully, click Edit to Untag your list and Clear your search criteria.