Partner Portal: Self-Service Lead & Commission Tracking

The situation

Patchworks is a well-established iPaaS platform with a large partner network — over a thousand companies across resellers, integration partners, and agencies. A subset of those partners are enrolled in a formal referral programme: they submit leads, and when a deal converts, they earn a commission.

The problem was that almost none of this had any real infrastructure behind it. Lead submission was a mix of emails and the odd HubSpot form — inconsistent, hard to attribute, and with no acknowledgment back to the partner. Commission tracking didn’t formally exist. A spreadsheet had been trialled as a proof of concept. A third-party PRM tool was evaluated and abandoned. Nothing stuck.

The business needed something purpose-built — but without locking the company (or its partners) into expensive tooling that would be replaced in six months.

The problem

In practice, this meant:

• Partners had no reliable way to formally submit a lead. Some emailed, some used a form — there was no standard process.
• Once a lead was submitted, partners had no visibility into what happened to it. No status updates, no confirmation it had even been received properly.
• Commission tracking didn’t exist in any automated sense. Whether a deal converted, what value it closed at, what the partner was owed — none of this was tracked or communicated systematically.
• HubSpot had deal data but it was disconnected from anything partner-facing. Xero had invoice data but it wasn’t linked to commission calculations.
• Any reconciliation that did happen was manual — slow, error-prone, and not scalable.

What I built

A self-service partner portal built on Softr (front end) with Airtable as the data layer, connected to HubSpot, Xero, Slack, and email via Patchworks iPaaS and Airtable automations.

Partners log in and can:

• Submit leads via a structured form in the portal
• Track every lead they’ve submitted — status, deal phase, whether it’s been actioned
• View their commission history — amounts earned, owed, paid, and upcoming quarterly payouts
• Manage their company information and team member access

Internally, the system handles the full lead-to-commission lifecycle automatically.

How it works

Lead registration

When a partner submits a lead:

1. The Softr form creates a lead record in Airtable with partner and client information.
2. An Airtable automation validates the lead — checking it’s correctly linked to a partner company in the partners table and that all required conditions are met.
3. If validation passes, a webhook fires to the Patchworks iPaaS platform.
4. A Patchworks flow runs against HubSpot: it checks whether the client company and contact already exist. If they do, it creates the deal and links all records. If they don’t, it creates the company and contact first, then creates the deal and links everything.
5. HubSpot returns the deal ID and client ID back through Patchworks, which writes them to the Airtable lead record.
6. From that point, Airtable automations keep the lead status in sync with deal-level changes in HubSpot — so when a deal moves from PQL to Approved to Client Pitch, the partner sees it in real time in the portal.

Commission calculation and tracking

When a deal is won in HubSpot, the partner becomes eligible for commission. The logic handles both monthly and annual deal structures — annualised values are normalised to a monthly equivalent so commission accrues consistently regardless of how the deal was priced.

Airtable creates individual commission lines for each month. Airtable automations — including inline scripts — cross-reference the HubSpot deal values against the corresponding Xero invoices to confirm the deal is actually being paid before commission is processed. Commission line statuses are updated accordingly.

Each quarter, a notification goes out to eligible partners (via Slack and email) with their specific commission line items and the amount to invoice. When the partner raises the invoice, Xero tracks the payment, and the status reflects back in Airtable — commission lines marked as paid as payments land.

The result

• Partners enrolled in the programme now have real-time visibility into every lead they’ve submitted and every commission they’re owed — previously had none.
• Lead submission went from a mix of emails and ad-hoc forms to a single structured process with validation, deduplication, and automatic CRM creation.
• Commission reconciliation moved from a non-existent or entirely manual process to a fully automated system — from deal won in HubSpot to commission line generated to partner notification to payment confirmation.
• Built using tools already in the company’s ecosystem (Airtable, Softr, Patchworks iPaaS, HubSpot, Xero) — no new proprietary PRM platform, no vendor lock-in, no ongoing licence cost for a tool that would get replaced.

What made this one worth building properly

The priority from the start was fitting the actual business need at the lowest sustainable cost — not picking an impressive tool and retrofitting the process around it. Everything in the stack either already existed in the organisation or added genuine, specific value (Softr for the partner-facing UI, Airtable for the data layer and automation logic). The Patchworks iPaaS platform handled the HubSpot integration in a way that meant no custom code was needed for the CRM side.

The result is a system that’s been running reliably, is maintainable by someone who understands Airtable and the Patchworks platform, and didn’t require a six-figure platform contract to get there.