Contract Manager

How to create legally binding contractual agreements and pay your sales agents their commissions

Ryan Mattock avatar
Written by Ryan Mattock
Updated over a week ago

CommissionCrowd gives you everything you need to easily create contractual agreements with your new sales partners.

CommissionCrowd's Deal Manager allows you to manage contracts, invoices, and payments within CommissionCrowd: if you’re a company, you no longer have to make arrangements for contract signing and payment outside of the platform; and if you’re a sales agent, it’s the same idea: you don’t have to leave the platform to sign your contract or to send invoices and receive payments. Plus everything is stored, managed, and tracked in one place.

For companies, the three steps to the Deal Manager are: connecting, setting up a contract, and paying the sales agent.

Connecting

Setting up a contract begins at any point after an agent, whose application you’ve approved, goes ahead and accepts this approval by connecting to the opportunity. You’ll receive an alert that will allow you to start setting up the contract. This is when you’ll see the form shown in Fig.1 below. This is where you enter your legal details, i.e., the details of your company as you want them to appear in the contract.

Setting up a contract

Companies can set up contracts in CommissionCrowd in different ways, depending on what you need:

  • Use our digital signing functionality so that both parties can sign the contract online and within the platform. There are two ways you can do this:Use our contract builder to generate a contract based on our template;Or else you can upload your own contract, which you and the sales agent both sign in the same way

  • If you already have a document signed by both parties, you can upload this presigned contract in the agent’s screen: Manage > [Agent name] > Contracts.

Contract setup 1

Fig.1. The first step in the contract setup

NOTE: At this point you can also opt out of the digital signing process entirely, if you want to upload your own fully signed contract (see below).

Fig.2. Choose to use the contract builder or upload your own

Then it’s time to choose between using the contract builder—which takes a generic template and populates it with your details and the agent’s details—or you can upload your own document. In both cases, the contract is sent to both parties for digital signing within the CommissionCrowd platform.

Let’s look at the contract builder first:

Digital signing using the contract builder

Fig.3. This form is auto-filled, but here you get a final chance to edit the information, as well as adding payment terms.

Next you see a form that has almost everything pre-filled, with the agent’s details on the left, and your company’s details on the right. In a nutshell, this form lays out what will be added to the final contract. There may be a couple of things here that you have to fill in. One is the payment terms. This is where you give brief details on when agents get paid. An example might be “Payment no later than one week after receipt of invoice,” or something more complex.

Another thing to check here is the due date for the invoices, which defaults to 7 days. If you need to change this, here’s where to do it.

When you click on the Generate Contract button, all the information is combined into the generated contract document, which you can then sign. Note that you’ll still be able to go back and change it.

Fig.4. The contract, with agent and company details added

Fig.5. Digital signing

Read the document carefully, and when you’re ready, sign it at the bottom. With this method of signing, you just click on the blue button. Then the agent will be notified that there’s a contract ready for them to be signed, and they’ll sign it in the same way. Then you will in turn receive notification that the contract signing is complete.

Fig.6. Once both parties sign the contract, you can download or replace it any time

After the process is finished you can download or replace the contract in the agent’s screen under Manage > [Agent name] > Contracts.

Digital signing using your own uploaded contract document

If you already have a contract document, but you also want the convenience of our signing process, it works pretty much the same way as above.

Fig.7. Choose between the contract builder and uploading your own contract

When you click Upload your own contract document, once you’ve uploaded the document from your computer (or Google Drive, etc), everything works the same as with the contract builder above, except that the information from the form is not inserted into the document, but is recorded in the database against your contract agreement.

NOTE: When the contract has been signed by both the company and the agent, a confirmation email will go to both. This will come from eSignatures.io, which is the service we use for electronic signing.

Uploading a previously signed contract

If you already have a contract that’s been signed by both parties, you should opt out of the process above. However, you can still add your contract to the system. Go to Manage agents > [Agent name] > Contracts and click to upload your document.

Fig.8. Company details for contract

After filling in some basic information, click Next to go to the document upload screen:

Fig.9. Uploading your own pre-signed contract

Fig.10. Uploaded contract on agent contracts screen

Once you’ve uploaded it, it’s available to download any time, for both you and the agent.

Paying the sales agent

When an agent closes a deal–this could be any lead the agent is working on, their own, or one that you’ve supplied–they’ll create an invoice and send it to you for approval.

Fig.11. Your invoices screen

Fig.12. View invoice screen

Viewing an invoice allows you to see a breakdown of what you’ll be paying. The invoice for the service fee (1or 2% depending on your membership), is added in addition to the agent’s commissions invoice.

Fig.13. CommissionCrowd's Stripe payment page for commission invoices plus service fee

Fig.14. Paid invoice

When you’ve paid the invoice on Stripe, you’re returned to the platform, where the invoice appears as Paid.

Coming soon

The Deal Manager is a big step, but we’re currently working on making it even better. New features to be added soon include:

Bank transfers

If you’re a company, you may want to use bank transfers to pay agents instead of a credit or debit card, so we’re working on that now.

Better international coverage

As of August 10, 2020, 39 countries are covered by this system: Stripe coverage. We have many valued agent members outwith those countries, so we’re making it a priority to achieve the widest coverage we can.

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