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Overview
Reconciliation is functionality to bridge commissions and process management. Specifically, it's the automatic matching of commission items to forms in a process. This is best suited for a process that tracks sales that result in commissions, like an Order tracking process. For this tips page I'll refer to an example process called Orders where each form is one Order.
Depends on data
The utility of reconciliation depends entirely on the data available in your order process and in your commission items.
- Best case: You're tracking a code that uniquely identifies an order (Example: "Order ID") in both a field in your Orders and in a custom variable with your commission items. In this case RPM will be able to automatically and accurately match the items up.
- Worst case: You have no reliable identification information that is captured in both commissions and process management. If you at least have customer, account, agency, and rep references in your order, RPM can use those to narrow down the possible matches, and hopefully reduce the amount of manual matching required. If you don't even have that information, then reconciliation probably won't work at all for you.
- Something in-between Most likely you have a different quantity and quality of information from each supplier and entered for each order. RPM will do the best it can, but expect to have to manually clean-up conflicts and spend time tweaking conditions to gather up unmatched items.
Which case am I?
How you approach reconciliation and how easy it is to use will depend entirely on how you've setup your custom variables, import matrix, and Order process. For each supplier you'll need to examine the data to see what variables can be used and if they're being filled in correctly (or at all).
Bare minimum
Reconciliation requires that your RPM subscription includes the commissions, process management, and reconciliation modules. You will also need commission item data and a process with forms and, at minimum, a supplier reference field.
Matching
In order to make use of reconciliation, RPM must be able to match a commission item to an Order. Each item can only be matched to one Order, but any Order may have more than one item. The system is designed this way because an Order may result in more than one product and may have one or more items show up each run for recurring commissions. A commission item is either "Unmatched", "Matched", or in "Conflict"
- Unmatched: The commission item has not been matched to an Order.
- Matched: The item has been matched to an Order. This item is now ignored for future automatic matching, while that Order may continue to gather more items.
- Conflict: A conflict occurs when an item could be matched to more than one Order. If this happens the item is not matched to any of the Orders and is instead flagged as being in conflict. A conflict is resolved by changing the reconciliation settings or Order values then running another reconciliation. Alternatively, a conflict can also be resolved by manually matching the item to one of the potential Orders.
Conditions
RPM decides which Order to match an item to based on conditions. Conditions are essentially a map of commission item variables to fields in the Order.
How to start
- You're going to be going back and forth between the reconciliation page and the reconciliation settings page so I recommend you open them in separate IE windows. A link to the reconciliation page will show up on the main process management page once you've set a process to the "Reconcile" method. This is done from the second page we need to have open, the "Commission settings" page for the template of the process we're working on.
- Keep the set of items and Orders that are eligible for matching as small as you can. This is managed through the reconcile settings where you can enter a run cutoff to ignore items that are too old and specify which Orders are eligible by status level. Depending on how you use the Archive feature, it probably makes sense to exclude archived Orders as well.
- Get one supplier working at a time. To do this, set all the other suppliers to "No" under the settings. Once a supplier is working you can leave it on if you like when you move on to the next one.
- For each supplier:
- Start by specifying the minimum amount of conditions. Go to the reconcile page and run a reconciliation. You will hopefully get some matches and/or some conflicts. If you have neither than you might not be able to reconcile this supplier.
- To reduce conflicts try adding more conditions. If there is no way to eliminate conflicts without eliminating matches as well then you'll have to resolve all the conflicts manually.
- To increase matches remove conditions. To reduce conflicts add conditions
- If you follow the path of least to most conditions then you may be able to add matches with each reconciliation. There is no harm in doing this since a matched item is ignored for future reconciliations, even if the new, stricter conditions would mean it now wouldn't get matched.
- Don't worry about comparisons at this point. The first step is to get matches. Once we have matches, then you can enter comparison information.
- This page was last modified 19:19, 15 Jun 2005.
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