How Distributor Orders Work

This page carries your actual distributor pricing. Keep it inside Dock Blocks; please do not forward it outside the company.

A distributor fills in one document and uploads it on their own private link. It becomes a Zoho order that George processes exactly like a Shopify order.

Part 1 · for Matt

1What a distributor sees and does

Each distributor has their own private page, branded to Dock Blocks. From there, ordering is three steps: get the document, fill it in against the rules on the page, and upload it.

The distributor upload page, showing the three rules and a worked example — **A distributor’s own upload page**The three rules, a worked example, and the upload button. Nothing else to learn.

The page tells them exactly what a good order looks like before they ever upload one, and links straight to the document they need to fill in.

The order template, showing the how-to-fill-it-in tab and the Order tab — **The document itself**Three tabs. How to fill it in, with a worked example; the full price list at their approved prices; then the order. SKU, product and the ship-to state are dropdowns. Quantity has to be a number above zero and the date has to be a real date, and the sheet refuses anything else, so a wrong one cannot be typed either way.

2What it refuses before anything reaches Zoho

Four things stop an order before it ever becomes a Zoho record. This is the guarantee behind the whole system: a bad order cannot get in.

An accepted upload, reporting what it read — **What a good file looks like**It reports what it read back: the PO, the lines and the total. If that is not what they meant to send, they see it here rather than three weeks later on an invoice.

Refusal: a product code that is not on the approved price list — **A product not on the price list**The code has to be one we sell. Nothing invented gets through.

Refusal: a typed price that does not match the approved price — **A price that does not match**Caught even if it was only ever a typo.

Refusal: an out of date price list — **An out of date price list**Ordering from an old copy is caught before the price is even checked.

Refusal: a rep group value that does not exist — **A rep group we do not recognize**It can be left blank; it cannot be wrong.

Every one of these is a real message from the real system, not a description of what it would say. If nothing is wrong, the order goes straight through; if anything is wrong, none of it does, and the distributor is told exactly what to fix.

3What lands in Zoho

An accepted order becomes a Zoho order the same shape as a Shopify order, so it runs through the same fulfillment and reporting.

Every line item, at the price on the approved list.
Dock kits arrive broken into the individual parts your warehouse actually ships, priced correctly and with the total exact to the cent.
The distributor’s rep group rides along on the order, which is what feeds the Ambassador Program.

4The end customer

You asked for the end customer to get the same three touches a Shopify buyer gets: order received, order shipped, and the PRO tracking number. One of the three works today.

Order received works. Their order is linked to a Zoho Contact when it arrives, and we are told if it cannot be, so nobody silently drops off.

Shipped and tracking do not reach them yet, and the reason is mechanical. Those two come from the BMS ship log, which finds an order by its subject line carrying a DB number. A distributor order is titled by the distributor and their own PO, so the ship log never sees it. The groundwork is in place; the join is not. It is on the list rather than done, and this page previously said otherwise.

5Adding the next distributor

Growth here does not mean a project. Adding a distributor is now something George does himself, on a page, in a few minutes.

Until this week, adding a distributor meant a developer editing a file, generating a key by hand, and redeploying the service. That is why it could never be a routine task: it was a release. It is now a form.

The distributor board, listing each distributor and the state of their link — **Every distributor, and the state of their link**Who can order, which Zoho account they are tied to, and where their confirmation goes.

A half-finished setup shows as incomplete and says which part is missing, rather than sitting on the list looking the same as a finished one. George picks it up where he left off; he never starts again.

Part 2 · for George

6Setting a distributor up

Five steps, once, per distributor. Nothing is created until you have confirmed it is the right company.

George, there is a shorter document for doing this. Running distributor orders is the same system written as tasks in the order you meet them, including replacing a link, switching one off, and what to check when something looks wrong. This section explains; that one instructs.

First, signing in

Your board lives at dockblocks-distributor.pivotplanit.com/distributor/admin/. Open it and you are asked to sign in: put in your Dock Blocks address, Cloudflare emails you a code, you paste the code and you are through. There is no password to remember and nothing to keep safe. Signing in lasts a day, so in practice it asks once each morning.

Use that address, not the one your distributors use. Theirs stays as it is and never asks anyone to sign in, because the private link in their email is what identifies them. Yours always asks, because the board shows every distributor at once.

If the code does not arrive, check junk before anything else. It comes from Cloudflare, not from Dock Blocks.

If they are not in Zoho yet

Most new distributors are not. The wizard opens on a Zoho search, and for a company we have never sold to that search correctly returns nothing. Add a new company is on that same screen, and it creates the account in Zoho without you leaving the wizard or opening another tab.

Adding a company that is not yet in Zoho, from inside the wizard — **Before step 1: add them to Zoho**It checks for a duplicate at the moment you press create, not before, so nothing can be created in the gap. A near match stops it and shows you what it found; creating anyway takes a second, deliberate press.

The duplicate check runs at submit rather than beforehand, which closes the window where somebody else creates the same company between the check and the write. It does not refuse outright on a near match, because “LFS” legitimately matches Gulfstream Marine and refusing on that would refuse the real thing.

Then, the five steps

Step one results: searching LFS returns both Gulfstream Marine and LFS, Inc. — **Step 1: find them in Zoho**Searching “LFS” returns Gulfstream Marine as well, on the letters inside the word. You pick from the results; you never type the account.

That last point is deliberate. Searching Zoho accounts for “LFS” returns Gulfstream Marine, because those three letters appear inside the word. A typed account number looks right and quietly attaches every order to the wrong company, so the system will not accept one.

1. Who. Search Zoho and pick the company.
2. Review. Nothing is created yet. This is where a wrong pick gets caught.
3. Create. The link is generated, the record is written, and their order document is built at today’s approved prices.
4. Check. Five checks against the running system, covered in the next section.
5. Hand off. The email to send them, ready to forward.

7Checking it works, and handing it over

Before the link goes out, the system proves the link works. It does not take the previous step’s word for it.

Step four: five checks confirming the new distributor link resolves correctly — **Step 4: does it actually work?**Five checks, run against the live service rather than against what the previous screen reported.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A setup screen that confirms its own work will happily report success on a link that does not open, because it is reading back what it just wrote. These five checks go the other way round: they ask the running system to resolve the new link exactly as the distributor’s browser will, and any no stops the hand-off.

Step five: the hand-off email, written and waiting to be sent — **Step 5: hand it over**The email, written for you. Nothing is sent automatically.

Once every check passes, the last step writes the email to send: their own copy of the order document, priced to today’s approved list, and their own private link. It is rendered from the real link and the real price-list version, and it waits for George to send it. Nothing is emailed automatically.

If a link gets out

Regenerating a distributor link, with the old one stopping immediately — **Regenerate**The old link stops working before the new one is shown. No overlap, because two live links for one distributor is worse than a few minutes with none.

An upload already in progress still completes. They held a valid link when they pressed submit, and a half-written order cannot be cleanly re-imported, so finishing it is safer than abandoning it.

8What everyone actually receives

Four emails. These are the real ones, rendered from the system, not mock-ups.

The receipt a distributor gets after an accepted order — **The distributor, on every accepted order**Their PO numbers and line counts, so they can check we read the file the way they meant it. Goes to their buyer, copying the second contact they named.

The order-landed email to Matt and George — **Matt and George, on every order**What arrived, from whom, and how many lines in each PO.

The same email carrying a Needs attention section — **And when something needs a person**A **Needs attention** section appears only when there is something in it: no Account link, or a customer we could not link, which means that customer will get no shipped or tracking notice.

The refusal email to George, listing numbered problems — **George, when a file is turned away**The problems numbered, so he can ring them and say “problem three”. The distributor already saw the same rows on screen.

There is a fifth, and it is the one that shows the system being careful. Until ordering is switched on for a link, the receipt says so plainly rather than promising scheduling that is not going to happen.

The receipt sent while ordering is not yet switched on — **Before a link goes live**“We have received your file and checked it. Everything reads correctly”, and then that nothing has been created yet.

8What you see when an order lands

You, Matt, and the distributor all get the same confirmation the moment an order is created: who sent it, which purchase order, and how many lines.

In Zoho, it is a Sales Order carrying their purchase order number, priced and lined out exactly as they submitted it, ready to work the way you already work a Shopify order.

9When something is refused

The distributor sees exactly what to fix, the same message shown in section 2, and can correct it and upload again straight away.

The alert on a refusal comes to us, not to you. A distributor fixing a column and re-uploading two minutes later is not something you need to chase, so it is not routed to you at all. It is always on the order history page if you go looking.

10Changing a price

When a price moves, four things happen, in order:

The approved price list is updated.
Every distributor’s document is rebuilt against it, at a new version.
Any order still coming in on the old version is refused automatically, the same “out of date price list” message shown in section 2.
You send out the new link.

The reason for the automatic refusal: it is what stops an old price sheet being ordered from six months from now, long after everyone has forgotten it went stale.

11Order history

Every upload, accepted or refused, shows up here, in order, newest first.

The order history page, listing recent uploads and their outcomes — **Order history**Every attempt, whether it went through or not.

This is the one place that can answer “did a distributor try on Tuesday and get bounced,” because a refused upload never creates a Zoho order and would otherwise be invisible. We also keep the exact file a distributor sent, unchanged, so if a question ever comes up about what they actually submitted, we have it.

Part 3

Decisions, and what you have redirected

Four calls, made so the system could ship. Two of them you have already redirected in your 11 September email, and they are marked as such.

Part numbers Fourteen rows on your price list carry the product name inside the part number, like “Kayak Storage Rack - DB-029.” You have asked George and Abraam to fix this at source so the product spreadsheet and the order document match, with George owning the master. Until that lands, we read the code off the end so it arrives as DB-029 and nothing is blocked in the meantime. One exception, on purpose: “Half Connecting Pin - HFP-006” stays HFP-006 rather than becoming DB-006, because Zoho already carries HFP-006 as its own product.

On your price list	Arrives as	Distributor price
Kayak Storage Rack - DB-029	DB-029	$819
Full Connecting Pin - DB-006	DB-006	$6
Half Connecting Pin - HFP-006	HFP-006 (kept, not renumbered)	$5

Kayak sizes KB-10 and KB-11 are both 13.3 by 5 at the same price, and the same holds for 12 and 13, 14 and 15, 16 and 17. The only difference is the length in the description. You have read this as a formatting problem and asked George to reconcile it with Abraam. Until the master is corrected we keep both, exactly as your price list has them, so whoever is ordering sees “10 foot” against “11 foot” rather than two identical-looking rows. If the pairs collapse to one SKU each, that is a change to the price list and the document follows it.

SKU	Size	Distributor price
KB-10 / KB-11	13.3 × 5	$1,594
KB-12 / KB-13	15 × 5	$1,802
KB-14 / KB-15	16.7 × 5	$2,010
KB-16 / KB-17	18.3 × 5	$2,218

Sales tax A distributor order carries none, and the distributor does not type one. These are resale purchases: the distributor charges their own customer and files it themselves, so adding tax here would charge it twice. If any distributor should be taxed instead, that is one change on our side.

If an order ever does arrive with a tax figure typed into it, it is refused rather than guessed at, naming the order and the amount. Guessing a rate would put one number on the order and a different one on the invoice.

The order document The copy we generate becomes the master, and the earlier edited copy retires. Two live price lists is how two different prices for the same product end up in circulation.

If any of these is not what you want, say so and we will change it. Each one is recorded on our side with the date, who decided it, and what would make us revisit it, so the answer does not depend on whoever is asked.

Part 4

What we still need

Does the end customer get a contract to sign? When a distributor order lands, Zoho sends the END CUSTOMER two things on its own: a Dock Blocks Sales Agreement to sign through Zoho Sign, and an order confirmation with the assembly guides attached. Neither comes from the ordering system, so nothing we can switch will stop them. That means somebody who bought a dock from LFS gets a Dock Blocks contract. It may be exactly what you want. It is your call, and it is the one answer needed before the first real order.

Is Distributor Cost per Kit freight-inclusive? George asked on 2 September and it has not been answered. It decides what an order is worth: on the Safety Handrail the difference is $90 against $440. Everything else about pricing is settled.

When a file is turned away, should the distributor hear about it? Today the refusal goes to George. The distributor already sees the problem rows on her own screen and can fix them, so she is not stuck, but nobody emails her. Whether she should also get a note is a judgement about how you want to look to them, not a technical question.

Settled, so it does not need discussing US Distributing’s contact is George, per your 11 September answer. Tax is resale, no association. LFS is set, with Barbara Zinkil as primary and Charlene Slayton as second.

Part 5

What is not switched on yet

Writing to Zoho is switched off right now, and stays off until Matt says go. Orders are read, checked and reported; nothing reaches Zoho.

It has been proven once, on purpose. On 10 September we switched writing on, sent one order through a test distributor’s link, and read the result back out of Zoho: the right account, the right rep group, the dock kit broken into the parts the warehouse ships, and the total exact to the cent. Then we deleted that order and switched writing back off.

So the answer to “does it actually create the order” is yes, verified, rather than expected. Turning it on for real is one setting, and it is Matt’s call.

Part 6

Where all of this lives

Two addresses, and they are deliberately different. One is for distributors and never asks anyone to log in. The other is George’s and always does.

Who	Where	How they get in
A distributor Barbara at LFS, and whoever comes next	dockblocks-distributor.pivotplanit.com	Their own private link. No login, ever. The link is the key, which is why each one is different and why it can be switched off on its own.
George and Alecia	dockblocks-distributor.pivotplanit.com /distributor/admin/	Cloudflare emails a one-time code. No password to remember, no token to keep, and access is removed by taking the address off a list.

The distributor address is not changing. Barbara has had hers since 1 September and a link already sitting in somebody’s inbox does not get to break because we tidied something up. Both addresses reach the same system.

George sees the board and can set up a distributor. He does not see the security log or the stored keys, and that is enforced by the server rather than by hiding buttons: a request for those simply does not come back with them.