Month end with two spreadsheets that disagree
Your product serves agency customers such as tenants, landlords, buyers or vendors, and you pay the agency a referral fee when their negotiators send someone who completes: a tenant who signs up for a utilities service, a landlord who takes out a product, a buyer who instructs through your service. At month end, the agency's office manager sends their spreadsheet of referrals. Yours shows fewer. Some referrals were made by phone, some through a form, some by email, and a few by a negotiator who has since moved branch.
Your finance person spends two days going through the differences, line by line, with the agency. Some are resolved, some are split down the middle to keep the peace, and the negotiators at the branch come away believing you underpay them.
Where referral tracking breaks
Referral arrangements with agencies are common across proptech and property services, and they are usually managed as an afterthought to the main product.
- Referrals come in through several channels, and only some capture which agency, branch and negotiator sent them.
- The event that earns commission happens weeks or months after the referral, when the link to the referrer is often lost.
- Commission rules differ by agency, product and date, and are held in contracts rather than in the system.
- Cancellations and clawbacks after payment are handled by hand.
- Agencies cannot see the status of their referrals, so they keep their own records.
What referral disputes cost
Negotiators who feel underpaid stop referring, and referrals are often a major source of your customers. Agency managers who spend time reconciling statements start to see the arrangement as a chore rather than income. Your finance team loses days each month. And without accurate data, you cannot tell which agencies and branches send the customers who stay, which is exactly what you need to know to decide where to focus.
The arrangement usually starts small, with one or two agencies and a founder keeping track in a spreadsheet. It works until the number of agencies grows, rates are negotiated differently for each, and a second product with its own commission is added. By then the spreadsheet has become the record of money owed, and nobody would choose to run it that way.
There is also an accounting risk. Commission owed but not recorded, or paid twice, distorts your figures and your agencies' figures alike.
How we build referral tracking both sides trust
What we build ties every referral to its source from the first moment and follows it through to payment.
- Referral capture from every channel: a tracked link or code per negotiator, a referral form inside your product or the agency's CRM where you integrate, and a quick-entry screen for phone referrals, each recording agency, branch and negotiator.
- Matching of new customers to referrals by email, phone and name, with uncertain matches sent to a review queue.
- Status tracking from referred to qualified, completed, cancelled or clawed back, updated automatically from your product's own records.
- Commission rules held in the system per agency and product, with effective dates, applied to each qualifying referral.
- Monthly statements per agency and per branch, showing every referral, its status and the commission, with a portal where the agency can view and query individual lines.
- Export to your accounting system, such as Xero, for payment and records.
- We also build a simple rule for late claims. When a negotiator remembers a referral weeks after the event, they can submit it with details, and it goes to a review queue rather than into an argument at month end. The decision and the reason are recorded, so the same question does not come up again next month.
| Stage | What is recorded | Visible to agency |
|---|---|---|
| Referred | Agency, branch, negotiator, channel, date | Yes |
| Qualified | Customer matched and eligible | Yes |
| Completed | Commission earned under current rules | Yes, with amount |
| Cancelled or clawed back | Reason and date | Yes |
| Paid | Payment reference and date | Yes |
Month end, afterwards
The statement is generated automatically on the first working day. The agency's office manager opens the portal, sees every referral by branch and negotiator, and queries two lines. One is a phone referral the negotiator forgot to log, which your team adds with a note. The other was cancelled, with the reason shown. The statement is agreed that day, payment goes out from Xero, and the negotiators can see their own referrals whenever they like.
Is referral commission causing friction?
- You and your agencies keep separate spreadsheets of referrals.
- Month-end reconciliation takes days and ends in compromises.
- Phone and email referrals are often not attributed to a negotiator.
- Commission rules live in contracts, not in your system.
- You cannot say which branches send customers who stay.