19 Jan 10 Build Your Own MLM Tracking Software With Joomla

We’ve been delivering great web pages to clients of The Web Doctor for several years now with Joomla. Along the way I’ve discovered many solutions to providing features requested on a custom web site with this software. Most recently we were approached by Tech Gen X with the task of building a custom payout reporting system that would not only track the earned commissions of an associate, but also track the pay out of the recruits under that associate for five generations! After looking over all the mlm downline software packages we decided it could be best case scenario if we could build our own solution from the ground up using Joomla components and open source ingenuity.

First of course we started with a standard 1.5 install. I will have to take a moment here and suggest that if you want a real website quick that scales nice you will want to go with Joomla. It’s kind of like the Linux of CMS in the sense that it’s free and has a large repository of add ons available at your dispense. Being the source code is open, available and based on consortium web standards you will find that Joomla is flexible to modify to your needs.

Next we needed to add people, phone numbers, addresses etc… To make Joomla socially capable you have no shortage of package options, but we use Community Builder for this operation. CB is like the Linux of Social Community Joomla add ons with all the upgrade modules to get excited about. So with this CB we could have an associate register and define what information we needed from that individual. We could also associate that person with their sponsor via ID. CB allows you to query the registering associate with custom defined variables like, “Sponsor ID”. The Sponsor ID is the recruiting associates ID number so if my ID is 3 and I recruit an associate, that associates Sponsor ID is 3. Now if that associate I recruited goes out and recruits someone else, if my recruits ID is 4 then that will be the Sponsor ID of whoever they recruit.  So with CB and these custom fields we have achieved a tracking system.

Next we need to define commissions. In this case the company is selling Clear 4g Wimax Super Fast Mobile Internet Service and other products. Each sale nets a defined commission for the associate so we need a way for the associate to enter that sale. For this I looked at the sales reporting process much like a reverse purchase. The associate would pick out what product they sold, enter the mac ID on the equipment and check out with their “order”. For this I went to VirtueMart. VM is like the Linux of shopping cart addons for Joomla. Starting to see a benefit of this Joomla yet? So in the shopping cart – which was HEAVILY MODIFIED – we were able to link each associate with an order id that included a commission amount. Now we are able to track associates, track the sales they made…but what about a payout commission for the five generations of recruits?

On an average sale the associate would make a $150 commission, and the person that directly recruited that associate would make $100. The next five generations of sponsors would each make $20. With our system already tracking who sold what and who sponsored who we just needed to tie it all together into a system that reported that commission. Long to short we went with SQL2EXCEL. s2E is like the Macintosh computer of database reporting. This amazing software component for Joomla can run sql queries against any table in your database and report them in a downloadable excel spreadsheet or, what we liked the most, in a rendered web page. Before I tell you what we did let me mention that S2E is a pay for component that cost us around $35. Very well worth it! First we created a query that reports to the logged in associate who their recruits are and who has been recruited by their recruits through six generations. This was achieved with lots of caffeine and table join trial and error. Fortunately their are very helpful people and resources at http://forums.mysql.com/. Next we crafted a query that took the previous query as a base, then took the order IDs for that associate and their six generations and calculated the earned commission of both direct sales and generational commissions.

In summary we used Joomla, Community Builder, SQL2EXCEL and VirtueMart all heavily modified to achieve the commission payout software for Tech Gen X. If you are in need of a similar software solution for your startup, feel free to contact The Web Doctor for a free consultation.