1. The one idea to get first
Almost every confusing thing in ProxiMap comes from one distinction, and once you have it the rest is obvious.
An account is a dot. An area is ground. They are two different things and a territory can have one without the other.
An account is a row from your file. A hospital, a school, a customer. It has a ZIP, so it lands somewhere on the map as a dot.
An area is a piece of the country. A county, a ZIP code, or a state. It is a shape, and it is what actually gets coloured in.
When you import a list with a territory column, ProxiMap knows which rep owns which account. It does not yet know which rep covers which ground. That is why a fresh import can look like a blank map even though every account came through fine. The dots are there. Nobody owns any ground yet.
Fixing that is one click, and it is the next section.
This also explains something that surprises people: a rep can own an account outside their own ground. That is not a bug. A system owned by one rep inside another rep's region is a real thing in the field, so the map shows coverage and the book shows ownership, and they are allowed to disagree.
2. The five minute version
If you only read one section, read this one.
1Open ProxiMap and pick "Your own list." Paste your spreadsheet or choose the file. If you want to see how it works first, hit Load sample.
2Click Next until you reach Open the map. The defaults are fine. If your file has a territory column we spot it and tell you so.
3Nothing. It builds itself. If your list names territories, we hand every county to the territory whose accounts sit in it, fill the gaps, and clean up the borders. You land on a finished map. Undo puts it back to blank if you would rather draw it yourself.
4Switch Tool to Lasso and fix what looks wrong. Pick a territory, draw a loop, approve it. Nothing commits until you say so, and Undo goes back ten steps.
5Hit Lock plan. That makes this map the source of truth the rest of the suite measures against.
That is the whole workflow. Everything below is detail on one of those five steps.
3. Getting your file right
CSV or paste. One row per account. A header row helps but is not required.
| Column | Needed | What we do with it |
|---|
| Name | Yes | What the account is called. Anything with name, account, facility, hospital or org in the header. |
| ZIP | Yes | Where it goes on the map. Header with zip or postal. |
| Size | Optional | Beds, revenue, students, volume. This is what you balance on. |
| Territory | Optional | If it is there, we build your territories from it automatically. This saves the most time of anything in the product. |
| Group | Optional | Your region, district, area, zone or division. We build the groups from it and drop each territory into the right one. Header can say group, region, district, area, zone, division, SBU, segment, cluster or pod. |
| Score | Optional | A ProxiScore exported from ProxiMed or ProxiSchool. We read it, we never invent one. |
Things that bite people
- Excel eats leading zeros. A Connecticut ZIP saved as 6067 instead of 06067 is the single most common problem with uploaded files. We put them back automatically, so you do not need to fix your file.
- Blank or N/A ZIPs cannot be placed. Those accounts stay in your plan and appear in a list under the map so you can fix them. They are never silently dropped.
- Non US postal codes will not place. A Canadian code like M5V 3L9 is not a US ZIP and there is nowhere to put it.
- Your own columns come along. Everything else in your file rides through to the export untouched, so your record IDs survive the round trip.
4. Building areas from accounts
This is the step that does the heavy lifting, and if your list had a territory column it has already run by the time you see the map. It takes a map where territories own accounts and turns it into a map where territories own ground.
It runs in three passes:
- Seed. Any county holding your accounts goes to whichever territory has the most of them in it.
- Fill. Counties with no accounts go to the nearest territory that already works in that state, so nobody ends up covering an island they have never sold into. This is what gives you a map with no holes.
- Smooth. A county surrounded by one other territory joins it. Repeated until it settles. This is what turns speckle into clean borders.
Smoothing moves ground. It never moves your accounts. Your book is exactly as you uploaded it when this finishes. Only the colouring changes.
Everything it did is one Undo away, and the message afterwards tells you the numbers: how many came from your accounts, how many were filled in between, how many got tidied.
Territories are also recoloured so no two that touch share a colour. If you picked a colour by hand, we leave it alone and colour around it.
6. The three select modes
Select decides what your tool is allowed to grab. It matters more than it looks.
| Mode | Grabs | Use it when |
|---|
| New | Only ground nobody holds | Drawing territories from scratch, so you cannot steal from yourself by accident. |
| Replace | Ground from whoever holds it | Adjusting a finished map. This is what you want after Build areas. |
| Remove | Hands ground back to unassigned | Carving something out deliberately. |
If your lasso says "0 picked up, N skipped, already in another territory," you are in New mode on a map where everything already has an owner. Switch to Replace. We now switch it for you after a build, but it is worth knowing.
7. Groups: the layer above a territory
Most sales orgs have more than one level. Region over district over rep is the normal shape, and if your territory names look like "SBU1 - Chicago" you are already doing this by hand inside a text column.
A group is a named bag of territories. Call it a region, a district, an area, a pod, a vertical, whatever you actually say out loud. Rename them to match your org.
A group owns no ground of its own. Ground belongs to exactly one territory, always. A group's coverage is simply the sum of its members. That is what keeps it safe: there is no way to end up with two things claiming the same county.
What a group gives you:
- One rolled up number. Accounts, size, counties and territory count per group, on the Groups tab and in the Report.
- A filter. Show only one group's territories on the map. Handy for a regional review.
- A colour. Tick "Colour map by group" and the whole map recolours to one colour per region instead of forty per rep.
- A zoom. The target button frames every territory in the group at once.
- A column in the export, so you can pivot by region in Excel or push it to a CRM.
The easy way: put it in your file
Add a column called Group, Region, District, Area, Zone or Division. We read it at import, build the groups, and drop each territory into the right one. Nothing to click.
The other way: set them up in the panel
- Open the Groups tab in the panel.
- Hit New group and rename it.
- Scroll to "Which group is each territory in?" and set the dropdown for each one.
Balance still lives at the territory level. It does not help that your regions look even if the rep territories inside them are not. Groups are for reporting and navigation. Balance the territories.
Groups and your team
If you are on a Team plan there are three views of the same map, and groups are the middle one:
- You, the owner. The whole map, editable.
- A regional manager. Assign them a whole group on the Team page and they see every territory in it, read only. Add a territory to that group later and they get it automatically, with no re-assignment.
- A rep. Assign them a territory and they see only theirs.
A manager or rep who is not building the map does not get the builder. They get a read-only view of their own patch: a header with their totals, buttons to zoom, save a picture and export their accounts, and the map. No wizard, no tools, nothing they cannot use.
Scoping happens on the server, not in the browser. A rep is not shown the whole book with the other rows hidden; the other rows never leave the server.
One level, on purpose. Two tiers covers almost every small and mid-size sales org. If you need region over district over territory, use groups for the top level and put the district in the territory name.
8. Balancing the workload
The Balance panel is the point of the whole exercise. Pick what you are balancing on in the dropdown: counties, accounts, size from your file, a ProxiScore, or federal data underneath the map.
- Ideal is the total divided by the number of territories.
- Deviation is how far off that a territory is. Over 15% gets flagged.
- Auto-balance reshapes unlocked territories toward an even split.
- Even out is the gentler pass: keeps your shapes, only shifts from the overloaded ones.
- Lock a territory and neither of them will touch it.
Balance on the thing that actually drives a rep's week. Account count is a fine start. Beds, revenue or a ProxiScore is usually closer to the truth, because forty small accounts and forty large ones are not the same job.
The Report tab turns all of this into a page you can hand to somebody: a balance grade, a workload table, and where the outliers are.
9. Anchors, coverage and drive time
Every distance in ProxiSuite measures from a territory's anchor. It is worked out in this order:
- A home ZIP you typed in the Settings tab. Always wins, because it is a person stating a fact.
- The middle of that territory's accounts. Territories built from a list get this automatically.
- The middle of its ground, for a territory that has been drawn but is still empty.
We anchor on the work, not on the geometric middle of the shape. Reps are productive when they sit near their accounts, and the empty ground between them is not where anybody drives.
Coverage draws rings from each anchor by drive time or distance, so you can see what a rep can realistically reach. Set the two ring sizes and hit Draw.
10. Scenarios: trying a shape before you commit
Realignment is an argument, not a decision. "Is the new shape actually better than the old one" is what it always comes down to, and the honest answer needs both numbers side by side.
Save the shape of the map before you start changing it. Then change it. Then look at the Report.
- Save this shape as a scenario lives in Actions, and in the Scenarios table in the Report.
- The table shows Now against every saved scenario: territories, groups, ground, worst gap, how many are flagged, and a balance grade. The best one is marked.
- Use this shape puts the map back to that scenario.
A scenario is a shape, not a copy of your book. It stores the territories, the groups and who owns which ground. It never copies your accounts, because your accounts are the same in every scenario. That is exactly what makes the rows comparable, and it means a scenario costs about a twentieth of a full plan to keep.
Restoring moves ground only. Your accounts stay where they are and Undo puts it back. If a territory in the scenario has since been deleted, its ground comes back unassigned rather than resurrecting a rep who is gone, and the message tells you how many.
A grade measured on Accounts and a grade measured on Counties are not comparable numbers. If you switch what Balance is measuring between scenarios, the table says so rather than putting two different things in one column.
11. Exports, PNGs and printing
Everything lives under Actions in the toolbar.
- Split a territory cuts one patch into two, three or four. It splits on where the accounts actually cluster, then the ground follows, and both halves stay in the same group.
- Move a territory into another is the reverse: everything from one goes to the other, ground and accounts.
- Export assignments gives you a CSV of every account with its territory, plus ZIP, city, county, state, size and score, plus every original column from your own file.
- Export map PNG is the picture of the map as it looks right now. What you see is what you get, so set the view first.
- For a single territory: open the Settings tab, hit the target button next to the territory to zoom to it, then export the PNG. That is how you get one clean picture per rep.
- Files name themselves after what is in the frame:
territory-denver-2026-08-04.png, group-west-2026-08-04.png, or territory-map-all-2026-08-04.png for the whole thing. Zoom to a territory and it is named after that territory; zoom back out and it is not, because a file called denver.png that shows the whole country is a file somebody pastes into the wrong slide.
Turn off the account dots before exporting a territory picture. A clean coloured map reads better in a deck than the same map with three thousand dots on it.
12. Saving, backing up, sharing
- Saved locally means this browser has your plan. It saves as you work.
- Backed up means a copy is on your account, so a new machine or a wiped browser is a restore rather than a loss.
- Back up plan under Actions puts the whole thing in a file on your device. That file restores everything: territories, ground, anchors, settings.
- Save map keeps this as a named map you can reopen later, so you can keep more than one.
- Lock plan declares it finished, and the rest of the suite starts reading it as the source of truth.
A big book uses a lot of browser storage. If you see a bar telling you this browser is out of storage, use Back up to my account or Save a copy to this device. Both work even when the browser cannot save any more.
13. When something looks wrong
| What you see | What it means |
|---|
| Blank map after import | Only happens when your list had no territory column. Draw the territories, or run Build areas from accounts once your accounts are in them. |
| Clicking does nothing | You are in Move map mode. Change Tool to Point or Lasso. |
| Lasso grabs nothing | Select is on New and everything already has an owner. Switch to Replace. |
| Every territory reads 0 counties | Same as the blank map. No ground assigned yet. |
| Ideal 0 each | Nothing to count yet. It fills in as soon as there is. |
| Rows we could not place | Blank, N/A or non US postal codes. They are listed under the map and stay in your plan. |
| A territory in several pieces | Usually real, from islands or a split book. Lasso the stray bits into a neighbour if you would rather they were joined. |
| Undo did not put everything back | Fixed in August 2026. Undo restored the ground but not the accounts, on every operation that moved them. If you are on an older build, check your account counts after undoing. |
| Colours repeat | Ten colours, more territories than that. No two touching territories ever share one, which is what matters on a map. |