A long, tedious process for paying contractors
Ideal Wellness contracts with world-class health coaches who help guide people through the ShiftSetGo weight loss program. A part of the program involves "Shift meals," which are purchased on the Ideal Wellness WooCommerce store.
Owners Adam and Emily Countryman wanted to use the sale of their Shift meals as a metric for paying their coaches’ commissions each month. The problem was, they had no way to automatically tie customers (and their purchases) to their coaches.
The best that could be done was to ask the coaches for a list of their customers and manually add up their purchases each month—a very tedious and time consuming process. In Adam's words:
We had to manually take a list of the clients, go to our point of sale, look at each person individually, look at their total for the month, calculate what they spent, what the commission was, and then send a check. So it was very manual.
A custom plugin that does the leg work of aggregating data
Our solution involved a custom WordPress dashboard plugin we named Coach Reports. The plugin pulls specific WooCommerce sales data and generates a table of helpful information. It lists customers by their associated coach and includes their purchases. It also includes a date filter and a CSV export function.
At the end of the month we pull the coaches report, which takes about 30 seconds, and then input the amounts into our payment system.
To make it even more automated, we added a "Coach Name" dropdown field on the front-end of the site. This allows customers to tie themselves with their coach when they create an account.
Moving forward
According to Adam, Ideal Wellness saves an average of about 45min a month figuring out their coach's commissions, which will only increase as they grow. On top of this is all the time and headache saved associating customers with their coaches. All the information they need is on a single, exportable page. Huzzah!
