What Flip360 actually is.

Not a marketplace. Not Uber. Not Hipages. A closed, vetted network of professionals — mortgage brokers, accountants, lawyers, conveyancers, building inspectors, insurance advisers, financial planners, real estate agents, trades — who refer their own clients to each other when those clients need a different specialist.

Mathew (mortgage broker) has a client buying their first home. They need conveyancing. Mathew refers them to Jodie (conveyancer) on the network. Jodie gets the work. The deal settles. Mathew gets paid a referral commission. The chain is cryptographically provable.

The platform’s value is the trust in the network, the discipline of the commission calculation, and the provability of the referral. None of those are marketplace features. They are referral-economy features.

migrations/0001_initial_schema.sql defines the contacts table with exactly four contact types. There is no “supplier” or “consumer.” There is this:

— migrations/0001_initial_schema.sql:43

And every contact has a referrer_id pointing back to the person who introduced them. The data model is fundamentally a referral graph.

migrations/0002_seed_verticals_and_rules.sql seeds exactly nine verticals. Every single one is a regulated or professional occupation — not a consumer category:

The seed data itself names the regulatory frame for each (FASEA Standard 7, NCCP Act, Legal Profession Uniform Law, etc.). The schema knows these are professionals, not consumers. Compliance notes on every vertical reference “referral fee disclosure” as the operating regime.

The deals table in migration 0001 has three foreign keys to contacts. Look carefully at which one is mandatory:

— migrations/0001_initial_schema.sql:140–142

The customer is optional. The partner is optional. The referrer is required. The schema is built around the fact that every deal is a referral made by someone — and that someone gets paid.

A “deal” on Flip360 is not a sale. A deal is a referral. Its lifecycle (the pipeline stages) is the path of that referral from intent to settlement.

migrations/0005_handshake_chain.sql opens with this description — it is the platform’s thesis in plain English:

— migrations/0005_handshake_chain.sql:5–11

Each handshake is a biometric signature on a phone (Secure Enclave / Touch ID / Face ID). Signatures are hash-chained. The chain is anchored hourly to an external trust authority (described in the migration as a KPMG/EY multi-party Merkle root in production).

This isn’t a CRM feature. This is the entire business proposition. Flip360 sells a referral economy where the chain from intent to payout is cryptographically provable — which means regulators, licensees and auditors can verify the disclosure and attribution were genuine, not back-dated.

Migration 0001 line 13 says it explicitly:

— migrations/0001_initial_schema.sql:13

The CRM is not a separate product. It is the front-end of the commission engine. The contacts, deals, pipelines, commission_rules, commission_events, ledger_entries, payout_batches, disputes and snapshots all live in the same database (flip360-commission).

What I built at /crm-demo/app in Deploy 2.0 is a separate set of demo_* tables I added in migration 0013. That was a mistake. There was already a production-grade schema for contacts, deals, and commissions. I should have built the prototype on top of those.

The flow the engine implements is: referral intent → customer acknowledgement → partner intake → partner settlement → customer outcome → commission accrual → cooling-off → eligible → approved → paid → (clawback window). The CRM is the way Mathew, Jodie and the rest see and act on that flow.

• BD’s job is to recruit trusted professionals into the network — not to sign “suppliers.” A good BD pipeline shows a prospect mortgage broker / accountant / lawyer moving from introduced through vetted to activated member.
• Sales’s job is to onboard members through KYC, compliance disclosures, payee-on-behalf paperwork (FASEA Std 7), and first-referral activation.
• CS’s job is to keep the referral flow healthy. Watch for members who stop sending or stop receiving. Resolve disputes. Make sure clawbacks are explained, not just executed.
• CMO’s job is about how new members find Flip360 and decide to join — PR, press, industry events, peer word-of-mouth. Not about acquiring consumers.
• The kanban pipeline at /crm-demo/app/bd/pipeline is the right idea, wrong subject. It should be tracking professional member acquisition, not generic “deals.” The deal kanban belongs somewhere else — probably on each member’s own screen, showing their outgoing referrals.
• Sarah Mitchell (the demo anchor) should be a MEMBER with referrals out, referrals in, and a referrer chain back to whoever brought her into the network. Not a “CHAMPION” lifecycle label.
• The 7 questions on /crm-clarity are mostly the wrong questions. Most of them dissolve when you re-read them through this lens. The actual open questions are listed in section 9 below.

Replacing the seven generic questions on /crm-clarity. These are the real ones, derived from gaps in the existing codebase:

1. Membership eligibility: Who can be a MEMBER? Vetted-only? Vouched-in by an existing member? Pay-to-join? One-per-vertical-per-postcode, or open competition?
2. Referral-fee splits: Standard rate per vertical (already in commission_rules), negotiated per referral, or member-tier based (Gold/Silver/Bronze members)?
3. Routing when partner is unspecified: When a member tags a referral as “any partner in MORTGAGE,” how does Flip360 pick? Round-robin? Skill-match? Member-preference? (The intended_partner_id column is nullable for this reason.)
4. Off-platform leakage: What stops a member referring a client direct, off-platform, to avoid the commission? Reputation? Audit? Member agreement? (Real question — every referral network faces it.)
5. The customer’s role: In handshake 2 + 4, the customer signs. How does that UX actually work? SMS link? In-person on member’s phone? Member portal?
6. Trail commission ownership: When a mortgage member refers a client and that mortgage has 30 years of trail — does the referrer earn trail for 30 years too, or only upfront? (Code supports both, default not set.)
7. Disclosure to the customer: When does Flip360 require the customer to be told “a referral fee is being paid”? Pre-engagement? At settlement? Both? (Compliance notes on each vertical hint at this; needs a uniform policy.)

These are the questions I’ll write into a new /crm-clarity — with Australian comparators (Loan Market, Domain, Mortgage Choice affiliate, etc.) instead of Uber/AirBnB — once you sign off on sections 1–8 above.