Associates

Who associates are

Associates are the firms you work with abroad: correspondents who send you clients and work, and agents you instruct in other countries. Each associate has a record with a name, contact person, emails, phone, country, website, address, VAT number and notes.

The associate page

The associate page brings together the clients they sent you, the trademarks billed through them, what they owe you, renewals in the next six months, instructions sent from their portal, their documents and an activity history.

Billing through an associate

When a client is set to Billed via associate, new work for that client is invoiced to the associate, and renewal and payment reminders go to the associate rather than the client. The associate is fixed on each mark and invoice when it is created, so a later change does not rewrite past work.

Rate cards

Each associate has a Rate card (also called the table of charges). For every service you offer, set whether it is offered, the official fee, the professional fee, the profit, the client price and a note. Fill profit from margin fills the profit column from a percentage.

• Changes you make take effect straight away.
• Rates or services the associate proposes wait for you to approve or discard them.
• Coverage lists the countries the associate handles, with a local contact for each.

The proposal studio uses these rates and countries when you prepare a quote.

Associate portal access

Under Portal access & permissions on the associate page, set a password or email their sign-in details, switch access on or off, choose what they can see and do (or follow the firm defaults), and use Preview portal as associate to see exactly what they see.

How it connects

This part of IPBases takes information from the parts on the left and changes what appears in the parts on the right. When you change one of them, check the other.