Field Sales App and Commission Engine: The Dromo Case Study
Dromo, the system a field and phone sales brokerage runs its day on: a rep app that names the door, logs the visit in one tap and waits out a patchy signal, and a back office that verifies the field, takes in deals and computes every commission.
- 5
- map colours, down from 24
- 60yd
- to name the door
- 38
- payout rules encoded
- 3,300+
- automated tests
A high-volume field and phone sales brokerage runs its entire day on Dromo, from the first door knock to the final payout. We built it in two halves: a back office that decides what counts and what gets paid, and an app in the rep's hand, on a sidewalk, between two houses, with three seconds to look at it. In September 2026 we rebuilt the app around that moment.
The problem
Commission-based sales operations outgrow their tooling fast. Activity is self-reported, deal records live in four places, and the schedule that decides what reps get paid is assembled by hand, so every payday is a negotiation. On the porch, the app has to say which house this is, take the visit in one tap, cope when the signal drops, and teach a new rep how it works without anyone standing next to them.
The rep app
A phone app, installed straight from the browser to the Home Screen on iPhone and Android, with no app store in between:
- A map you can read at a glance. Every status folds into five colours: new and calling, appointments, clients, needs a follow-up, and closed out. The label on the pin carries the rest, and red is never a lead colour; it is kept for money at risk and errors. A book groups into counted bubbles when zoomed out and breaks into single pins from a few blocks away. With 5,000 invented leads loaded, zooming back and forth across that hand-off held 60 frames a second, worst frame 19 ms, measured in a desktop browser sized as a phone.
- A door that names itself. Within 60 yards the app names the house, says how often it has been tried ("3rd time here"), fills the office's opener in for that homeowner, and logs the visit with one tap. Whether the knock counts is a separate, wider rule set by the back office. We wrote up why one radius cannot do both jobs.
- Visits that wait out a patchy signal. An outcome that cannot leave the phone is kept on it, shown as waiting, and sent by itself, oldest first, when the connection returns. A send that might already have landed is never repeated automatically: the rep decides, so no door is counted twice. More on how the queue works.
- The day in one sentence. Today opens with where things stand in words ("Four down. Lorna is one hundred sixty feet up the street."), then the numbers, the route and the next stop. Everything the rep owes lives in one list: overdue, today, upcoming.
- A manual made of video. Eight voiced, captioned chapters of about a minute each, reached from the sign-in card, from More, and from the screen that asks for location.
The back office
One coherent backend, 98 live API endpoints across 15 route modules, serving every part of the operation:
- GPS-qualified field activity. Rep check-ins are verified against a 250-yard geofence, with five qualification outcomes and explicit reason codes, so activity numbers reflect presence, not paperwork.
- A payout engine with the rules written down. 38 payout rules covering rates from 45 to 120 percent across four payout structures, with statement reconciliation resolving every line into one of eight explicit states.
- Deal intake that defends itself. Real-time duplicate checking runs read-only with a hard timeout, so bad entries are caught at the door without ever blocking the pipeline.
- Integrations without lock-in. A commercial CRM, a predictive dialer, spreadsheet exports, address verification, mapping, and a finance read-API, all behind clean internal interfaces.
- Four background job queues with separate worker processes handle syncing and heavy work off the request path.
The database is the enforcer: 48 purpose-built indexes, triggers and functions that make invariants impossible to violate, timezone-aware timestamps, and fixed-precision money everywhere pay is involved. Authentication uses short-lived tokens with rotating refresh, and every external integration is throttled to be a polite citizen of the systems around it.
What it proves
Most sales tools report on the operation. Dromo runs it, all day, with money on the line. Field software earns trust on the porch: an app that names the right house, says out loud what it is still holding, and explains itself in a minute leaves a rep no reason to keep a second notebook. Behind it sit 3,349 automated tests in 206 files, all passing three full runs in a row on 22 September 2026, because the parts a rep would notice breaking are the parts that decide what gets counted.
Dromo is available as a product.
Every screen shown is Dromo's demo mode: the real app over an invented book.
Frequently asked questions
- What is Dromo?
- Statistique's field sales app and CRM. Reps run the whole day on a phone app installed from the browser: the plan, a map of the book, the door they are standing at, follow-ups, clients and their own numbers. Behind it, a back office verifies activity, takes in deals and computes every commission.
- How does the app know which door a rep is at?
- It names a house only when the phone is within 60 yards of it, and only when the phone's own fix is accurate to 55 metres or better and no more than two minutes old. Whether the knock counts toward the rep's goal is a separate rule set by the back office, 250 yards by default.
- What happens to a visit logged on a weak signal?
- If the send fails, the outcome is kept in a queue on the phone, shown as waiting, and sent by itself, oldest first, when the connection returns. A send that may already have reached the server is never repeated automatically: the rep chooses, so no door is counted twice.
- How are commissions calculated?
- By an engine, not a spreadsheet: 38 payout rules across four structures with rates from 45 to 120 percent, and statement reconciliation that resolves every line into one of eight explicit states.
- Does Dromo replace an existing CRM and dialer?
- It does not have to. Dromo integrates with commercial CRMs, predictive dialers, spreadsheet exports, address verification, mapping and finance systems behind clean interfaces, so it becomes the operational core without a rip-and-replace.
- Are the screens real?
- They are the real app running in its demo mode, over an invented book with invented reps and homeowners. No real rep, customer or address appears.