The Fundamentals of Admin Tools

Lessons

3.1 What is Admin used for and who should use this?

Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

The Admin Panel

The Admin panel is the control center of your Colateral platform. Think of it as the system's engine room. It is a powerful, modular configuration space designed to let you build, manage, and maintain your organisation's unique system data foundation.

Rather than relying on external support, the Admin section gives you total self-service functionality to tailor the platform to your exact business workflows.

Administrators leverage the Admin panel to handle the backend configurations that drive the rest of the user experience, including:

• Data Architecture: Setting up structural master files, building bespoke Custom Fields, and defining Elements (such as specifications lists) and Asset (fixtures & fittings) assignments
• Allocation Management Pre-configuring complex Allocation Rules to be utilied during active campaigns later.
• Estate & Inventory Management: Structuring data fields for Locations, mapping Assets (fixtures and fittings) and assigning them to specific areas.
• Operational Governance: Organising platform content with Features, Tags and Location Lists. Setting up external Suppliers, and auditing live platform changes using the User Activity History log.

Who Should Use Admin?

Because the Admin panel dictates how data behaves across the entire platform, access should be tightly managed. It is explicitly built for:

• Site Administrators / Power Users: The designated owners of your Colateral environment who are responsible for the initial system setup, ongoing structural data maintenance, and core platform workflows.
• Data Management Teams: Users tasked with preparing, uploading, and validating massive organizational datasets (such as store profiles, element lists, and asset registers).

In short, if your role involves defining how teams collaborate, where campaigns are distributed, or how information is structured, Admin is your primary workspace - made for regular system users; like Head Office staff, Marketing Teams or Creative Agencies.

3.2 Locations Data in Admin

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Foundation of Your Network

Before you can display marketing, you need to tell Colateral where your business actually operates. In the Admin panel, Locations represent the baseline physical spaces of your estate. Your Stores, Branches, Franchises, or Retail Sites.

On their own, locations are blank canvases. They represent a destination on a map, waiting for you to populate them with physical fixtures and marketing campaigns.

Structuring Your Hierarchy

Managing hundreds of sites individually is a headache. Colateral solves this by allowing you to organize your Locations into a clean, searchable hierarchy within the Admin console. You can group locations by:

• Geography: Regions, territories, countries, or cities.
• Store Format: Flagships, express stores, kiosks, or digital-only hubs.
• Ownership: Corporate-owned vs. franchise locations.

Why Clean Location Data Matters

Your location database is the source of truth for the entire platform. When you accurately upload and maintain your store list in the Admin panel, you ensure that regional compliance, shipping addresses, and local management permissions are perfectly aligned.

Takeaway: Think of Locations as the "Where" of your retail operation. Setting them up correctly in Admin ensures your marketing always lands in the right corner of the world.

3.3 Assets Explained

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Meeting Your Fixed Estate

If Locations represent the "Where," Assets represent the physical "What." Assets are the permanent or semi-permanent fixtures, fittings, and promotional spaces housed inside a specific location.

Assets are things you can physically touch in a store that are built to hold marketing collateral. Examples include:

• Front window lightboxes
• A-boards on the pavement
• Checkout counter stands
• Perimeter shelving units
• Digital display screens

Assigning Quantities and Positions

Assets don't exist in a vacuum; they are explicitly tied to your Locations. In Colateral, an Asset profile tracks not just what the fixture is, but how many exist and where they sit inside a specific store.

For instance, Store A might have two Front Window Lightboxes, while Store B only has one. By mapping these assets directly to each store profile, Colateral builds an exact digital twin of your physical retail footprint.

The Asset Advantage

By cataloging your assets, you eliminate the guesswork of campaign planning. You will never accidentally send a heavy-duty outdoor A-board poster to a mall kiosk that doesn't have an outdoor pavement space.

Takeaway: Assets turn a generic store address into an intelligent retail space. Once your assets are mapped, Colateral knows exactly how much promotional real estate you have to play with.

3.4 Element Fundamentals

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Blueprint for Your Creative

You have your stores (Locations) and you have your fixtures (Assets). Now you need the rules for the actual marketing materials that go inside them. Elements.

Elements are the architectural specifications for your marketing collateral. They do not represent a specific marketing campaign (like "Christmas 2026"); instead, they define the permanent physical rules of engagement for an item.

An Element specifies:

• Dimensions: Height, width, and depth (e.g., 1200mm x 1800mm).
• Material: Paper, vinyl, card, acrylic, or fabric.
• Orientation: Landscape, portrait, or double-sided.
• Production Constraints: Finishing requirements, hem sizes, or weight limits.

Matching Elements to Assets

Elements act as the bridge between your creative artwork and your physical in-store fixtures. You explicitly link Elements to Assets to tell the system what fits where.

Think of an Element as a protective sleeve. An element tells the system: "I am a graphic specification built precisely to slide into a Front Window Lightbox Asset."

Why Elements Save Your Sanity

Instead of redefining production specs every time you launch a new campaign, you create your Elements once during onboarding. When it’s time to design a new campaign, you simply attach your new artwork to the pre-existing Element blueprint. Colateral instantly knows the exact printing specs and which fixtures can hold it.

3.5 Introduction to Features

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Adding Intelligence to Your Data

Your retail estate isn't uniform. Two stores might have the exact same layout and assets, but operate in completely different contexts. To handle these nuances without creating messy workarounds, Colateral uses Features.

Features are descriptive attributes or "tags" that you apply to your Locations, to add a layer of granular intelligence. They allow you to capture the unique traits of your business.

Common Ways to Use Features

Features allow you to filter and target your marketing based on real-world variables:

• "Bilingual Area,"
• "High Footfall,"
• "Drive-Thru Only,"
• "Store-within-a-Store"
• "Premium Tier Only"
• "Eco-Friendly"

Supercharging Your Targeting

Features prevent the need to create endless unique store groups. Instead of creating a manual list for "Stores that speak Spanish and have a Drive-Thru," you simply tell Colateral to launch a localized asset to any Location that possesses both the Spanish Language feature and the Drive-Thru feature.

Takeaway: Features are the brainpower. They allow you to run highly targeted, hyper-local campaigns with a single click.

3.6 How Locations, Elements, and Assets Talk to Each Other

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Golden Trio:

To fully grasp the power of Colateral, you need to understand the relationship between the three pillars of your data architecture: Locations, Assets, and Elements.

When these three components talk to each other correctly, your campaign distribution switches from painful manual data-mapping to complete, error-free automation.

Think of it as a retail theater production:

• You need a stage (Locations)
• The physical props fixed onto that stage (Assets)
• The specific script or costume designed to fit those props (Elements)The Cross-Talk in Actio

When you launch a marketing push in the Campaign Builder, you don’t manually choose which posters go to which stores. Instead, Colateral facilitates a three-way conversation behind the scenes:

1. The Campaign calls for a specific Element (e.g., a "Summer Window Graphic").
2. The system looks at which physical Assets are built to accept that Element (e.g., "Front Window Lightbox").
3. The system scans your Locations to see which stores actually possess that specific Asset.

Example: If Store A has a window lightbox, it automatically gets the graphic. If Store B doesn't have that fixture, the system intelligently skips it.

The Result: No over-ordering, no waste, and absolutely no manual matching spreadsheets required. By mastering how these three blocks click together during your initial data setup, you unlock the ability to scale complex retail campaigns effortlessly.