Rep Buddy

Rep Buddy is designed to assist an Avon Rep to keep track of their catalogues, customers, orders, and deliveries on their iPhone or iPad.

To be successful as a distributor you need to have a good system in place. To help you in organising your weekly catalogue activities you are encouraged to set up distribution rounds.

As you build your business you would like to distribute catalogues to potential and of course existing customers on a regular basis. You can organise rounds to cover a particular week and set its rota to 3, 4, 6 or 8 weeks.

Imagine you are beginning a new area to start distributing your Avon catalogues in search for new customers. This is how you could use the app...

Getting started
You want to start a new round. Go to menu More (bottom right) and select Rounds. Tap the plus (top right) to add a new round. Give it a name relating to the area, such as 'Poplar Street'. You want to repeat going to this area at a certain frequency, such as every 6 weeks, and you want to start current week Wednesday, so select that as the next date. Tap the Lock icon on Android or Done on iOS.

You are asked if you want to add customers to this round. You don't have any yet, so you can do that later if you want. (If you already have a customer base you want to add the customers first and add them to a newly created round with the app at this point.)

Now you go to the area and drop the catalogue pack at the addresses in the area you think where the potential customers are. You can add these addresses as customers although they are just potential customers at present. You go to Customers (fourth menu button at the bottom). Tap the plus (top right) to add a new customer.

Select the street. As there are none at the beginning you need to add one by using the plus again. You need to select a place. As there are none at the beginning you need to add one by using the plus again.  Type in the name. The place can be a village name, or if you are in a city the name of a neighbourhood. Tap Lock/Done and you get back to the select screen. Select the added place and tap Lock/Done. Type in the street name and tap Lock/Done. You are back on the screen where you can now select the added street and tap Lock/Done. Fill in the house number. If the house has an addition like A or B or something else you can fill that in too. Any name plate at the address you can fill that in too. Select the round you have added before, which is Poplar Street in this example. Any notes you want to keep you can type under comments. Tap Lock/Done to finish adding this first potential customer.

You can repeat this for each next address, where the last selected street will be pre-selected.

Catalogues to drop
Go to the To Do list (first menu button at the bottom). If you have current week selected you will see the list of customer addresses you have just added for the round. On iOS slide each row to the left to reveal the Dropped option and tap it to mark it off. On Android tap the Lock icon, select the rows, and tap the Dropped button.

Catalogues to collect
A few days later you go back to these addresses to collect the catalogues and hopefully you have some orders. Go to the To Do list again and select the To Collect tab which will show you the list of addresses where you had left the catalogues. On iOS slide each row to the left where you could get the catalogue back and mark it off as Collected. On Android tap the Lock icon, select the rows, and tap the Collected button.

When you have all the catalogues collected the round is finished.

Orders
When you have collected your catalogues and have found orders you register these using the Orders menu (third menu button at the bottom). Tap the plus (top right) and select the customer and tap Done. Fill in the total order value. You can use the Note field for details you want to keep for this order. Tap Lock/Done to finish.

Repeat this for all orders you have found from the collected catalogues.

You will find all added orders under the To prepare header.

Later when you have received all products for your customer orders you can work through this list. For each order you have all the products, select the order, tap Lock/Edit (top right), and slide the Ready to deliver switch and tap Lock/Done. These will be listed under the To deliver header.

Deliveries
All orders that you have set as ready to deliver will be listed here. As you go to your customers, hand over the order and receive payment, on iOS slide the order row to the left to reveal the Delivered option and tap it, but on Android tap the Lock button on the top right, select the rows, and tap the Delivered button.

All deliveries will be listed under the Delivered tab and grouped by month.

That's it. This is the workflow for a catalogue drop round. Your rounds will reappear in the To Do list as the frequency have been set.

You can expand your rounds by adding more customers as your business grows. When you view your customers you edit your records and add more contact details. You can also see the order history of each customer.

Have fun using Rep Buddy!