Sales Routes and Sellers

A sales route is a group of customers with someone in charge of it. You build routes in the Hub, add customers to them and assign each route to the seller who covers it. The seller portal reads that assignment: when a seller signs in, the customers they work with are the customers on their routes.

Three things are managed together on the same screen. Routes hold the customers. Sellers are the people who cover the routes and sign in to the portal. Distributors are optional and sit above the routes, grouping several of them under one commercial name. A route has at most one distributor and, depending on how your organization is set up, one seller or several.

Routes decide who a seller works with, never what the seller can do. The portal's capabilities (the customer book, prequalification, building an operation) are set once for the whole organization in Configuring the Portal, and every seller gets the same portal whatever routes they have.

Where Routes Live

Routes have their own entry in the Hub's main sidebar, Sales routes. The entry appears when your organization has the sellers feature enabled and your user has the borrowers.read permission. Creating or changing routes, sellers and distributors also needs borrowers.write. Without it you see the same screens and the same data, but none of the buttons to create, edit, import or delete.

Sellers and distributors have no sidebar entry of their own. Both open as side panels from the routes page.

One route setting lives somewhere else: Route assignment, which decides whether a route has one seller or several. It sits on the seller portal settings card (user menu Settings, then the Configuration section, then Seller portal), in the Seller access section, and like the rest of that card it needs configurations.write and takes effect when you save the card.

The Routes Page

The page header reads Sales routes, with the byline Group your customers by area and give each group an owner. Next to it are the buttons. Distributors (2) and Sellers (12) open the side panels, and the number in each shows how many there are, up to 200. New route, which only users who can edit see, opens the route dialog.

The table shows one route per row:

Above the table you can filter by seller with Seller: all, and by distributor with All distributors, which also appears only when distributors exist. The search box matches the route name and nothing else. To find the routes of a particular seller, use the seller filter instead of typing the seller's name.

When the table is empty, it says why. With no routes at all it reads Create your first sales route, with a short explanation and, for users who can edit, a New route button. A search that finds nothing reads No route matches "North", with the text you typed, and reminds you that Search only looks at the route name. To find routes by seller, use the seller filter. A seller or distributor filter that leaves nothing reads No route for that seller. In both cases Clear filters clears the search and both filters and brings the full list back.

Click a row to open that route's detail.

Creating and Editing a Route

New route opens the New sales route dialog. To change an existing route, open it and choose Edit route from its Actions menu, which opens the same fields under the title Edit route.

Only the name is required, so you can create the routes first and assign sellers and distributors later.

One Seller or Several per Route

By default a route has a single seller. The Route assignment setting on the seller portal card has two options:

With several sellers, each of them has the route's customers in their portal, exactly as if the route were theirs alone.

Switching back to One seller per route does not touch the routes you already have: a route that has several sellers keeps them. The next time someone saves that route, though, the save is refused with This workspace assigns a single seller per route. To allow several, change the route assignment in Settings → Seller portal. The Assigned seller picker shows only the first of the route's sellers, so choose the one seller to keep in it, even if it is the one already shown, or change the setting back, and the save goes through.

A Route's Detail

The detail page shows the route's name, its description if it has one, and two tabs: Overview and Credit impact. Users who can edit also get an Actions menu with Edit route and Delete route.

Overview has two parts. On the left, Details lists who covers the route (one name, or one chip per seller when there are several), the seller's Email and Phone when the route has exactly one seller, the number of Customers and the date the route was Created. A route with nobody assigned shows Unassigned, and users who can edit get an Assign seller link that opens the edit dialog.

On the right, Customers lists the route's customers, 20 per page, with a search box to find one of them. Each row has a link that opens the customer's profile in a new tab and, for users who can edit, a Remove from route action. Removing takes effect immediately, without a confirmation. It takes the customer off the route and nothing else: the customer's record and data are not touched. Add customers opens the dialog described in the next section.

A route without customers shows This route has no customers yet in that list, with Add customers for users who can edit. A search inside the route that finds nobody shows No results, and See all customers clears it.

Delete route asks for confirmation first. Deleting a route takes every customer off it and removes the route, never the customers themselves: their records stay in your organization as they were.

Adding Customers to a Route

Add customers opens Add customers to the route, a search over your organization's customers (the same customer records described in Borrowers) with three filters that combine with each other:

The search runs on its own as you change the filters; there is no button to press. When you filter only by field or address, without free text, the dialog also shows how many customers match in total, for example 240 customers. The list itself shows the first 20 results, so narrow the filters until the customers you want are on screen. The customers you tick stay ticked while you change the filters, so you can build one selection across several searches.

Until you set a filter or type at least 3 characters, the list reads Type at least 3 characters and search. A search that finds nobody reads No customer matches the search or the filters.

Tick the customers you want and press Add (3), where the number is how many you selected. A confirmation such as 3 customers added closes the dialog and refreshes the route.

A customer can be on several routes at the same time, and the dialog says so under the list: A customer can belong to several routes at once. Adding a customer to a route never takes them off any other route, so every seller who covers any of those routes has that customer in their book. Adding a customer who is already on the route does no harm: nothing is duplicated, and that customer does not count again toward the route's limit.

Two errors can stop the addition. Too many customers at once. Add them in smaller batches. means a single addition carried more than 1,000 customers. The route reached its customer limit. Create another route for the rest. means the route is full: a route holds up to 5,000 customers, and the rest have to go on another route. Only customers who are new to the route count toward that limit.

Sellers

Sellers (12) on the routes page opens the Sellers panel, subtitled The people who cover each route. It has a search box and, for users who can edit, Import and New seller. With no sellers yet, the panel reads Add your sales team, with a New seller button for users who can edit.

Each row shows the seller's name, their email when they have one, a status line about their portal access and how many routes they have (for example 3 routes). The status line depends on how your organization signs sellers in. With access links it says whether the seller has no access yet or an active, revoked or expired link, and when they last signed in. With one-time codes it says whether the seller can receive a code on the configured channel. Both are explained in Access and Sessions.

For users who can edit, the menu at the end of each row has Edit and Delete and, when your organization signs sellers in with access links, Generate access (or Regenerate access once the seller has had a link) and, while the access is active, Revoke access. With one-time codes there are no links, so those items do not appear.

The Seller Form

New seller opens a form inside the panel:

Only the name is required, but a seller who signs in with a one-time code needs the contact for the configured channel: without a phone for WhatsApp or SMS, or without an email for email, no code can reach them.

Each Seller Needs Their Own Email and Phone

Two sellers of the same organization cannot share an email or a phone. The comparison ignores letter case in emails, and in phones it looks only at the digits, so spaces, dashes, dots and a leading plus sign do not make two numbers different. When you save a seller whose email is already used by another seller, the save is refused with Another seller already uses that email. The login identifies a seller by it, so two sharing one leaves both unable to sign in. A repeated phone gets the same message about the phone.

If a row in the panel reads Phone shared with another seller: no code is sent or Email shared with another seller: no code is sent, two sellers already share that contact. Edit one of them so that each has their own.

Importing Sellers from a Spreadsheet

Import opens Import sellers from a spreadsheet. It takes an .xlsx or .xls file with one row per seller and the columns label, email, phone and externalId. Only label, the seller's name, is required. Download the template gives you an empty file with those columns already in place. Pick your file with Choose a file and press Import. A file can carry up to 1,000 rows; a larger one is refused as a whole, so split it into several files.

If something fails along the way, a notice says where: We could not build the template. when the template cannot be downloaded, We could not upload the file. when the file does not reach the Hub, and We could not import the file. when the import itself fails. When the Hub knows the exact reason, it shows that reason instead.

Every row is attempted on its own, so a bad row never stops the rest of the file. The result is a report, for example 4 created, 1 skipped, 2 failed., followed by a table with the Row number as you see it in your spreadsheet, the Name and the Reason for every row that was not created:

Because a row whose externalId already exists is skipped rather than duplicated, the safe way to recover from a partial import is to fix the failed rows and upload the same file again. That only works for rows that carry an externalId: a row without one is created again on every upload, unless its email or phone stops it as a duplicate.

Deleting a Seller

A seller who still has routes cannot be deleted. The menu item reads Delete (has 3 routes) and is disabled, and if the deletion is attempted anyway it is refused with This seller has 3 routes assigned. Reassign them before deleting. Move those routes to another seller, or leave them Unassigned, and Delete becomes available. Deleting asks for confirmation.

Distributors

Distributors (2) on the routes page opens the Distributors panel, subtitled Group several routes under the same distributor. It has a search box and, for users who can edit, New distributor. Each row shows the distributor's name, its External ID under the name when it has one, and how many routes it has, with Edit and Delete in its menu. With no distributors yet, the panel reads No distributors yet, with a New distributor button for users who can edit.

Once a distributor exists, the route dialog gains its Distributor field and the routes page gains the Distributor column and the All distributors filter. Like a seller, a distributor that still has routes cannot be deleted: its menu item reads Delete (has 3 routes) and stays disabled until those routes move to another distributor or to none. If the deletion is attempted anyway, it is refused with Cannot delete: the distributor still has 3 routes.

The distributor's External ID has a second use. When the portal settings take the branch number of an operation from the distributor list, the seller picks one distributor from that list: the distributors of their own routes or, when the portal's search scope is opened to the whole organization, every distributor of the organization. What gets saved as the branch number is that distributor's External ID. The setting is described in Configuring the Portal, and what the seller sees in Operation Data and Payment Plan.

Things to Know

A route says whose customer it is, not what the seller can do. Adding customers to a route puts them in the book of the sellers who cover it. It does not turn anything on for those sellers or those customers: capabilities are set once for the whole organization in Configuring the Portal. What the seller sees in their book is covered in Customer Book.

A seller with no routes has no customers. A seller who exists but covers no route signs in to an empty book, unless the portal's search scope is opened to the whole organization. Assign the route before you hand out the access.

Routes can also grow from the portal. When the search scope is limited to the seller's own routes, a prequalification that finishes and identifies a customer who is not yet on any of that seller's routes adds the customer to the seller's first route. A customer already on one of the seller's routes stays where they are. Customers can therefore show up on a route without anyone adding them in the Hub. See Prequalification.

Without an External ID, a distributor cannot be picked as a branch. The portal's distributor list leaves out distributors with no External ID, because there would be nothing to save as the branch number. If your organization takes the branch from the distributor list, fill in the External ID of every distributor.

Free sellers and distributors from their routes before deleting them. A seller or distributor that still has routes cannot be deleted: reassign those routes, or leave them without a seller or distributor. You do not need to delete the routes. Deleting a route, on the other hand, never deletes customers: it only takes away that grouping.

A customer can be on more than one route. Adding a customer to a new route does not take them off the routes they were already on, so several sellers can have the same customer in their book. To move a customer, add them to the new route and remove them from the old one.

The lists of sellers and distributors on the routes page stop at 200. The counts on Distributors and Sellers, the seller and distributor pickers of the route dialog, and the Seller: all and All distributors filters load up to 200 sellers and up to 200 distributors. Beyond that, the rest do not show up in those lists, although the search inside the Sellers and Distributors panels still finds them.

The search on the routes page only looks at route names. A seller's name typed into it finds nothing. Use Seller: all to filter by seller.

Give each seller their own contact before switching to one-time codes. Sellers created while your organization used access links may have no phone or email, which did not matter then. With one-time codes, the panel shows which sellers cannot receive a code, and they cannot sign in until you add the missing contact.