Creating Transactions Manually

Not every sale flows through your WooCommerce store or your LMS checkout. Phone orders, invoiced deals, offline payments, and sales through channels that Siren doesn’t integrate with all need to be recorded if you want collaborators to earn credit for them. The transaction creation screen lets you do that.

This guide covers creating the transaction record itself. Once the transaction exists, you can attribute it to a collaborator using the manual attribution workflow, which runs the transaction through the normal program pipeline and creates conversions and obligations.

When to create a transaction manually

The most common situations are sales that happen outside of your connected commerce plugin. A customer calls in and you process the order manually. A client pays via invoice and the payment never touches your store. A deal closes through a channel that doesn’t have a Siren integration. In each case, the sale is real but Siren has no way to detect it automatically.

Creating a transaction manually records the financial details of that sale so it can participate in Siren’s attribution and commission system.

How to create a transaction

Each line item represents a piece of the sale. The fields that matter most are the name (what was sold) and the type, which categorizes the item for commission calculation. The available types are product, subscription, fee, discount, shipping, and tax. If you create a line item with the type “shipping” and the program doesn’t include shipping in its calculation, that line item won’t count toward the commission.

A simple sale might have one product line item. A more complex transaction might include products, a discount, shipping, and tax as separate line items, so that the commission calculation handles them correctly based on the program’s compiler settings.

What happens after you create the transaction

Creating a transaction records the sale, but does not create any conversions or commissions. To credit a collaborator, follow the manual attribution workflow.

A typical workflow

A customer calls to place an order. You process the payment through your payment processor outside of your store. Then you go to Siren > Transactions, create a new transaction with the order details, and save it. Later, when you know which collaborator referred this customer, you select the transaction and attribute it to that collaborator. Siren handles the rest.

If you already know who referred the customer at the time you create the transaction, you can create and attribute in quick succession. The two-step process is there for situations where you need to record the sale now and figure out attribution later.