Cleaning up product units
- John Nairn (Unlicensed)
- Sue Michael (Unlicensed)
- Sharon Harden (Unlicensed)
Overview
Incorrect product units are one of the more frequent causes of significant cost and sell price issues. Some of the key things you need to know include:
- How to adjust your sell units to be different to Office Brands. Also is display on website set correctly to make those product prices flow to the website where required, such as for catalogue products where units have been changed
- What to do if your incorrect units have caused your stock on hand to be wrong
- Archiving product units you do not want to use to stop them being applied to products
- Setting sell quantity breaks based on your default sell unit
- What products have different units to the price book and are those difference justified
Procedures
Identifying product unit issues that effect products
In many cases products with very high or very low GP have incorrect buy or sell units. So identifying which products have unacceptable GP percentages can identify many kinds of product unit problems. See:
Which product sell prices need to be fixed
You can also compare your product units to the price book to identify more product unit issues
Using a price book list view variant to review product units
Correcting errors in your master list of product units
You need to understand how to setup, manage and block use of product units
Manually changing units on products is sometimes the right thing to do
Manual changes to product units need to be made only when you absolutely have to. Even then there is a lot to know in order to get the changes right
Understanding and changing product units can help by better manage your purchases and sales
If you change the sell unit and price of a catalogue line, the change may still not appear on WebX unless you do it properly
Overriding sell prices on products
Stopping your team from using the wrong unit for a product
Product units can be changed on transactions. Unless you restrict available units, ANY unit can be used for any sale of a product
Preventing your product unit changes from being removed by automatic product updates
Any change you make to product units on bar codes, default sell units on products, product units on suppliers and available product units on products may be changed or removed by product updates from Office Brands. If you want to make your own changes to product units and want to import data from Office Brands, you have to understand how what to do to stop your good work being deleted by the next product update
How Office Brands catalogue loads and price book runs determine product units
Further reading: Getting started with automatic product price updates
Sometimes the best solution is to take manual control over cost and sell updates to the product. This has to be used only when you have to. The down side being the need to manually update those products in the future unless you switch them over to override to calculation method instead of fixed sell.
Marking products to be ignored by a catalogue load or other automatic updates
Using the right unit when setting up bulk sell prices
If you setup your own bulk sell prices you must understand that sell break quantities are based on the default sell unit. If the default sell unit is box(30) and you want the user to get a better price only if they buy one box (30 each). You have to set the bulk quantity break to 1 not to 30. A quantity break of 30 in this case would mean the customer has to buy 30 boxes to get the better price. So they would have to buy (30X30) = 900 eaches to get the bulk price.
Setting up quantity break sell prices
Readysell and Office Brands now allow you to better manage some products where you buy the product in a box but sell it as an each
Making use of Office Brands Support For Changing Stock Unit
Products that sell by the box or by each where WebX is setup to sell the product by the Box
Making your product units work with the product units on WebX and the data portal
Making use of Office Brands Support For Changing Stock Unit
The special case of selling part of a product unit
You might stock a bulk product that is sold by length. For example a meter of computer cable. You can only sell stocked products by whole units. There is a procedure for handling this special case.
Selling less than a meter of a product sold by the meter
Selling your time
Non-stock products such as Labour and Travel Time can be sold in parts of a unit, for example half an hour. To do this the unit used must be a unit of time
Service/Machines Initial Setup Checklist
Correcting stock when the unit is wrong
You will get some products with the wrong unit. There is only one correct procedure for fixing the stock on hand for such products
Correcting incorrect product units and costing using a stock quantity adjustment