Business Partners

Most pool companies have two or three handshake deals: the realtor who passes on every new listing with a pool, the builder who hands over finished jobs, the repair shop that does not do weekly service. You owe those people something per customer, and right now you are tracking it in your head.

Business Partners is a ledger for exactly that. Reach it from the Leads page.

What this is, and what it is not

It is a notebook. No money moves through PoolChecker, and your partner is never contacted, notified, or billed automatically. You settle with them however you already do, and this just tells you the number.

That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. Moving referral fees would make us a payment facilitator and put us in the middle of your fee disagreements, which helps nobody.

It is also a completely different thing from Refer & Earn in the main menu. That one credits your PoolChecker subscription when you refer another pool company to us. This one tracks what you owe your own local partners.

Adding a partner and logging a referral

A partner is a business name, a fee percentage, and optionally a contact name, email, phone, and notes.

Logging a referral takes the partner, who was referred, and what that customer paid you. The fee owed calculates itself. You can leave the amount blank until you actually know it and fill it in later.

The fee percentage is frozen the moment you log the referral. Raise a partner from 5% to 10% next season and every historical entry keeps the rate it was actually agreed at. Nothing rewrites itself behind you.

Two tiles at the top carry the only numbers you usually want: what you currently owe across everyone, and what you have already settled. Mark an entry settled when you pay, and it stamps the date.

Partner referral forms

Each partner can get their own lead capture form tagged to them, which is how a referral gets attributed without anyone remembering to mention it. PoolChecker will generate a 4" x 6" referral card with your logo, the partner's fee offer, and the QR pointing at their form, sized to live on their desk or their truck. You can email the partner their link straight from the share panel.

One thing to watch. A submission on a partner-tagged form logs the fee-owed entry immediately, at submit time, before that person has become a paying customer or spent a dollar. That is intentional so nothing gets lost, but it means the ledger can list referrals that never convert. Review it before you pay anyone out.

Ripple effects

• The amount paid is always yours to enter. PoolChecker does not watch your payments and guess which ones came from a partner; connecting those two would be wrong more often than right.
• The fee is one time per referral, not a recurring cut of that customer forever. If your deal is a trailing percentage, log an entry per period.
• Removing a partner who has referrals archives them rather than deleting, so the ledger keeps telling the truth about what you already paid.
• Everything here is private to owners and managers. Techs never see it.

The efficiency trick

Set the percentage once per partner and never negotiate per deal. The entire value of this page is that at any moment you can answer "what do I owe you?" with a number instead of a guess, and that only works if the rate is a property of the relationship rather than something you renegotiate per customer.