Multi-level inventory categories - Palladium

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Multi-level inventory categories - Palladium

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SUP201 – Multi-Level Inventory Categories

Overview

We have added another 2 levels of Item Category (to 3) in order to facilitate the Inventory Search and reporting functions in the Palladium Enterprise and Palladium Premium editions. This function is available on all Inventory search functions throughout the application and has also been added to the offline PoS module that is available in the Palladium Enterprise Edition only.

Processing

From a processing point of view, you can simply select the category selection below and the system will cascade your selections right down to the last level. Not all levels are mandatory giving the flexibility for you to only see the levels that are optimal for your business.

This functionality has also been incorporated into the Point of Sale and new Offline Point of Sale modules.

Reporting

All these additional fields have been added to the Business Intelligence cubes, allowing you to slice and dice the data as required. You can also start to compare your sales mix across years or months. using a dimension for say bottle size would allow you to view your sales mix of 340ml vs 500ml at a glance.

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SUP034 – Automatic Credit Note Allocation

This feature allows you to automatically match/allocate Credit Notes to Unpaid Sales Invoices on the fly.

How Does This Feature Help Your Business?

  • Accurate credit allocations.
  • Offsets the credit immediately, this eliminates the process to have to manually apply the credit to the Sales Invoice.
  • Saves you time.

Feature Setup

Firstly, to activate the feature, you go to the Control Panel in Company options. On the Receivables tab, ensure that the option below is checked. Should this feature not be activated, then the Credit note will appear on the customer’s account as an unallocated credit.

Feature Functionality

To process a Credit Note, select the invoice then click on the Credit Button (subject to the users requisite security access rights) .
If the full invoice value was credited, the Sales Invoice will not appear in the Outstanding Invoice Feature within the Process Customer Receipts function as it has been automatically been matched to the Credit Note.
General Note 
 If you pass a Credit Note to a Sales Invoice and it is not for the full amount, only the net outstanding amount will appear on the outstanding Receipts above the “Amount Owing” field.

SUP035 – Sales Discount Matrix

This feature allows you to tailor default customer discounts by a Customer and Inventory Category pricing Matrix table. This gives you the ability to create and manage discount prices for an unlimited number of combinations due to that fact that you can create an unlimited number of Customer and Inventory Categories as well as an unlimited number of Customer Pricelists.
Note: This feature is currently available on the Palladium Business and Palladium Enterprise versions.

How Does This Feature Help Your Business?

  • Eliminates erroneous or unauthorised discount entries.
  • Allows you to logically group factors that result in price adjustments.
  • Secure, since access to edit discount rates may be granted to specified users only.

Feature Setup

Palladium offers the option to disallow specified users access to the Price Discount Matrix setup function and also allows you to set access rights to amending the Document Line-Item Discounts at a user-level.
  

Feature Functionality

Firstly, set up the discount matrix rates accordingly. In the example below, a customer who is set as a Distributor will receive a 12,5% discount on handbags and a 15% discount on Shoes as default.
On the Invoice below, the discount is then applied accordingly i.e. the first 2 items are stock items, therefore, a 20% discount is granted. The next item is a service and a 15% discount is then granted.
Feature Related Q & A’s
Q: If I do not have a discount setup for certain customer and item categories, am still I able to apply a discount at line level?
A: Palladium is not limited to applying discounts through the Discount Matrix only. You are able to apply a line discount to all Account Receivable and Account Payable documents at the time of processing. This would apply in a scenario where a discount is applied at the time of sale or purchase.  In addition to this you have the ability to apply a discount to the total document itself.

SUP036 – Credit Note Authorisation

This feature allows you to Create a Request for Credit Document for items that have been or may have been returned for Credit. Businesses realise that passing a credit note is tantamount to giving someone cash and the additional security level is critical to managing returns.

How Does This Feature Help Your Business? 

  • It adds an additional security step for returns or a state where warranties and/or the condition of goods can be checked before credits are passed.
  • It offers additional security for management to assist in reducing theft and fraud in an organisation.

Feature Setup

The ability to allow for Credit Return Requests is set through the Company Options Setup Function.

Feature Functionality

To Create a Request for Credit all we need to do is to pass a Negative Quantity Sales Order. On saving the system will convert this to a “Request For Credit Document” as seen below.
Once the authenticity of the Credit Request has been established, all the manager needs to do is to Convert the document by simply opening the Credit Notes window and clicking on convert. The following window will appear showing all credit request currently on the system.
 
Once the authenticity of the Credit Request has been established, all the manager needs to do is to Convert the document from the Sales Request and to Record/Update it accordingly.

SUP091 – Delivery Advices

The Delivery Advice feature allows you to create Deliveries without the need to process Invoices, while still affecting the inventory on hand. This feature works in the precise inverse way as GRV’s, wherein GRV’s act as an intermediate process between the receiving of inventory and the processing of the Vendor invoice. The delivery advice acts in the same way as an intermediate step between the delivery of Customer goods, and the invoicing thereof.

This feature is not to be confused with the delivery notes within the system that are available for printing during the Process Invoice function.

Use for the Feature

This feature would generally be used in a number of processes, and often where deliveries are made to customers where you would require a POD before processing the Invoice, normally due to Over or Under Deliveries.

Another use would be where deliveries for a specific order are made in intermittently throughout a period such as deliveries to a Project, where the client only requires one Invoice, so would be used more for an internal rather than external purposes.

Setup

Activating the Function
In order to activate the Delivery Advice feature you need to go to the Control Panel >> Options >> Receivables >> Settings 2. Then activate the feature by selecting the Create Delivery from Sales Order setting, with other settings to prompt or Warn on Open Delivery Advices at time of invoicing, much in the same way as we do with Pick Tickets on converting Sales Orders To Invoices. The other settings are to determine whether you would like to print the Price on the Delivery advice or to display the price on the Delivery Advice processing screen.

Control Account Setup
Because this Delivery Advice feature created a financial Transaction, ie Credit Inventory and Debit the Delivery Advice Control Account you would need to set the Delivery Advice Accrual Account in the Linked Account Setup Screen.

User Rights and Processing icon
Once you have activated the function you now need to set the respective user rights and on logging in, the Delivery Advice Icon will be available for the respective users.

Delivery Advice Processing

Creating Delivery Advices

To begin using this feature you will select the Delivery Advice Icon. In the example below I created a Sales Order for 2 x Bicycles and 2x Bicycle Helmets. Then on processing the Delivery Advice elected to only deliver 1 of each item. You will see that there is also a field for Total Delivery Quantity to add aid the Despatch and Drivers.

When processing the second delivery, the system defaults only the undelivered quantity of the order as seen below.

Processing Invoices
Once you would like to create an invoice simply select the invoicing processing function. If you first select the customer you will be prompted with the open delivery advices. Alternatively, you can click straight on the Delivery Advice Convert Icon as seen below,

And you will then be presented with a list of open deliveries that you can select to invoice as seen below.

What is notable about this feature is that you can convert from Multiple Deliveries to a Sales Invoice. Incidentally, this function works in conjunction with the ability to convert multiple Sales Orders to a single Sales Invoice.

On invoicing you will see that the items are grouped per item per delivery, for easy identification purposes.

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SUP106 – Understanding Customer Credit Control

The Palladium Credit Control is managed in 2 separate stages in the form of Sales Order Level and Sales Invoice level. There is no credit management for Sales Quotes of Freehand Quotes.

Sales Invoices

There are 2 ways in which we control and set up the Credit Management for invoices in the form of Over Credit Limit, and Overdue Invoices.

Over Credit Limit
To use Credit Limit Control you first need to activate the function “Default Credit Control for New Customers” above and insert a default Credit Limit for New Customer creation. The Credit limits are set at customer level as seen below – and governs / limits the total amount of goods or services invoiced to clients. In the screen below you will see that we will activate the Credit Control function at Customer Level. Once the credit limit has been reached, the user will be unable to invoice the client further.

In addition to this you can set the system to Allow / Block or Warn on Customers over their Credit Limits for added flexibility.

Temporary Credit Limits
Should users wish to exceed customer credit limits but still exercise control and discretion by using the Temporary Credit Limit function as seen above. The temporary credit limit is supported by an expiration date for greater control.

Overdue Invoices
The credit block on Overdue Invoices manages the ability to process invoices on Customer accounts with overdue invoices. An overdue account is classified as an account with invoices over their due credit terms. Ie if an invoice was due to be paid at the end of January, the system will disallow invoices processed in February until these overdue invoices are paid. Note that there is an option for the discretionary management for credit control on overdue invoices with the option settings to Allow / Block or Warn on generating sales on accounts with overdue invoices.

User Overrides
We have the option to allow for user / managerial overrides on Credit Block on accounts with overdue invoices at time of processing the Invoice.

Sales Orders

Credit Block On Overdue Invoices
This function allows you to Control the processing of sales orders where clients have overdue invoices. You also have the ability to set the function to Allow / Block or Warn on processing orders for clients with Overdue Invoices, as well as the ability to convert these to Sales Quotes on the fly.

Credit Block On Over Credit Limit
This function allows you to Control the processing of sales orders where clients are over their credit limits. You also have the ability to set the function to Allow / Block or Warn on processing orders as required, as well as the ability to convert these to Sales Quotes on the fly.

Include Open Sales Orders in Available Credit
This function sets the available credit display on all Sales Document Processing screens to factor in the value of open Sales Orders for clients who want to view the credit limit as the total exposure to the client. In the screen below you will see we have created a Customer with a credit limit of R2,000 and a Temporary credit limit of R2,500 where we have included the open Sales Order in the available Credit value.

User Overrides
We have the option to allow for user / managerial overrides on Credit Block on accounts with overdue invoices at time of processing the order.

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SUP112 – Salesperson Processing

This article will explain the use of Salespersons in Palladium from both a Setup as well as a document Processing Point of view. This feature facilitates the ability to have multiple salespersons within a single sales document and also caters for a 3-tier salesperson hierarchy from Account Manager, Regional Manager down to the salesperson on the document. We can also report on the actual user who entered the transaction should this also be required.

System Setup

There are 3 system settings relating to salespersons as displayed below:

Default Salesperson Selection Method
We have the ability to define whether we will use the Default Salesperson set at a “User” or at a “Customer” level as the default salesperson on the processing document. Using the default by “User” means that the salesperson assigned during the Users Setup will be used when processing sales documents where the latter will use the setup by Customer or Customer delivery address (explained in more detail below).

Blank Salesperson
This function allows you to Block / Allow or Warn on blank Salespersons on sales processing documents where there are no Salespersons setup for that Account. This is more relevant to Freehand Quotes where there are no default Salespersons setup on the “Freehand Account”.

Salesperson Processing by Document or Line
This new feature in Palladium Enterprise V10 allows you to define whether you would like to record the Salesperson for the Document or have the ability to record this by Line item. We would generally allow the recording by line where more than one person is directly involved in the sale.

Item Product Manager Reporting
Should we require the ability to report on Sales or Sales margins by item group or category – we could create a user-defined field for Product Manager and link this person to the Inventory Masterfile and report accordingly through our BI module.

Customer Masterfile
The default Salesperson can be set on the Customer Settings tab as seen below, with an Overriding Salesperson being set at Customer delivery address. What this does is to allow you to now set a default Salesperson per region, that is set once and filtered through to the processing document for ease of use.

Reporting
All these Salesperson field are available to you in our Palladium BI and can be added to any excel sales report allowing you to report on the Salesperson (manager) on the Main Account, Salesperson set at the Delivery Address, or simply the Salesperson who processed the transaction.

These are all supported by User-defined fields at Customer Account Level, Document Header level and even at Document line level for a pretty muck unrestricted reporting experience.

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SUP113 – Customer Sales Discounts

The purpose of this article is to explain the use of the applying of Customer Discounts in Palladium Enterprise. The discounts are in the Form of Item Line Discounts and Customer Trade Discounts (Document Discounts).

Item Discounts

There are 2 settings relating item discounts as follows:

Item Discount Matrix
The item Discount Matrix is a Discount Matric that is Applied to a Customer Category vs an Item Category.

Setup
To set this up go to Inventory / Maintenance / Price Discount Matrix. In the screen below you will see that we have 3 customer categories with 5 Inventory Item Categories, each with their own default item discount value.

Processing
When processing a sale for a Customer assigned to the Wholesale Category, the Discounts relating to the respective inventory Category will be applied as seen below.

Item Contract Pricing
This function allows you to set an Overriding Discount per Item Category per Individual Customer or for a Group of Customers based on the value of the Item Sale for that specific item Category.

Item Contract Pricing Setup
To set this up go to Inventory / Maintenance / Contract Pricing. Then select the Validity Date Range for this Special Pricing, then set the price value breaks and overriding discount value for the Inventory Categories. You are not obliged to set the Value Breaks and could have the additional discount apply from the first cent.

In the screen below you will see that we have set an additional discount for Ring Sales between $2000 and $9,999.99 and another from $10,000.

Using the Inclusion / Exclusion function you can include only specific items for the overriding discount, meaning that you could have the special discount relate only to specific items without having to change the Inventory Category as seen below.

The date ranges allows you to set Multiple Pricing Ranges and Variations within the same Discount Matrix Type as seen below. This is the same as the new date-base Customer Pricing in Palladium as seen below as well as on the Trade Discount Matrix below.

Assign Contract Price to Customers
Once we have set up the contract pricing we need to assign the Pricing to a Customer. To do this simply go to Customers / Maintenance / Settings Tab and navigate to the Contract Pricing section as seen below.

Processing
When we process a sales document with the value for rings over $10,000 you will see that the discount has increased to 12% for this Customer.

Customer Trade Discounts

These discounts are applied on a per Customer basis and applied as an overall Document Discount. We have 2 Types of Trade Discounts in the form of General Customer Trade Discounts and a Trade Discount Matrix.

Setup
To set this up, simply go to Accounts Receivable / Maintenance / Customers / Settings Tab and navigate to the Trade Discount section as seen below and enter the discount value.

Processing
Once Set, the discounts will appear on all sub-total of the sales document (net of item discounts above) as seen below.

Trade Discount Matrix
This function is similar to that of the Item Trade Discount Matrix in that it allows for a variable Trade (Document) Discount with the ability to Include and Exclude specific items.

Setup
To set up the various Trade Discount Matrix Types, go to Accounts Receivable / Maintenance / Trade Discount Matrix Types. Like we had previously you can set the selected items in which you would like included in the additional “overall” discount structure as seen below.

Assign to Customers
To assign this Matrix to your Customer(s), simply go to Accounts Receivable / Maintenance / Customers /Settings Tab and navigate to the Trade Discount section as seen in an earlier screen assigning the relevant Matrix type.

Processing
Once we have setup all we do is to process an invoice with the respective value and the Trade discount will adjust Dynamically as seen below.

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SUP040 – Related Items and Upselling

This feature allows you to set an unlimited number of “Upsell” Items for Optional Dynamic Prompting per processing document. Additionally, this feature can be used to group a number of items together say in the form of Kits or Standard Orders by attaching an unlimited number of Inventory Items to a service Item as an example.

How Does This Feature Help Your Business?

  1. Provides you with extensive sales-related information, which optimises the sales process.
  2. Increases staff productivity as it limits training requirements.
  3. Reduces processing errors and makes it simple for new employees to sell specialised products.
  4. Can also be used to Relate items to others such as Item Supersession.

Setup

To illustrate this functionality, I will use an Outdoor Retail Store as an example. To get started I go to the Inventory Module | Inventory & Services and select the Primary Item that you would like to link the Related Items to. Then select the Related Items tab, and select the items that you would like to link to the primary Item. There are two primary settings here. They are as follows:

  • Qty and use Proportionate Quantity – this setting will allow you to change the ratio of Primary Items to the Related Items. An example for this would be that you may require 2x Battery Packs for every 1 x Torch sold.
  • Auto-Invoke Reminder(as signified by the checkboxes) – when selected, the system will prompt, or auto-invoke the user to purchase the respective related item as soon as the Primary item is selected for the respective processing function such as Sales Invoices or even Point of Sale.

Note
You can still view the related items on sales documents at any stage without setting them as “auto-invoke” as detailed below.

Processing

To use the function generates a sales document and select the Primary/Linked Item. There are 2 ways in which we can access and select the Related Items from the various Sales Items, either as an Auto-Invoke or a Manual Selection as detailed below.

Auto-Invoke

In the example above we have set the Sleeping Bag as the Primary Item, and have set the Flashlight and Suntan Lotion as Auto-Invoke Items. On selecting the Sleeping Bag, you will see that the system automatically prompts to add the related Items.

Manual Invoking

We can manually invoke the Related Items at any time by selecting the Related Items Button on the sales form that will allow you to select the required related items.

The screen below shows my Master Item () and Related Items (sleeping bag, gumboots, lantern, tent, etc).

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SUP044 – Understanding Freehand Quotes

This feature allows you to create Quotes for Clients (and prospective Clients alike) while managing the margins of sales and service items (including prospective items). Additionally, the Purchase and Sales Documents can be created on the fly, all from the same screen, offering traceability from the purchase of the item, to goods receiving through to the sale of the item.

How Does This Feature Help Your Business?

  • Create quotes for Prospective Clients without having to Create a Customer Masterfile Record.
  • Create quotes for Prospective Items without having to Create an Inventory Masterfile Record or use the function to control Buyouts.
  • View and manage margins as a value or as a % of the total deal value
  • On acceptance, have the ability to create the Inventory Items and Customer Records on-the-fly
  • Create the Sales and Purchase Documents all from the same screen
  • Have the option to view all Suppliers for a specific item, with the system selecting the preferred Supplier as default

Feature Options

Create a Quotation for a Prospective Customer or Prospective Inventory Item
Here you can create a quotation for a prospective OR a current customer, as well as a prospective OR current Inventory or Service Item. This allows you the ability to handle Buyouts whilst maintaining the appropriate margins. If you refer to the Vendor Field on the Item Line, you can also specify the details of the Vendor that
was used to cost the quote. (Note that in the case of standard Inventory Items, the system will default the preferred Vendor for that Item and give you the ability to select another or assign a Vendor to that Item.


Converting the Quotation
Once the Customer has approved the quote, we can now convert the details to a Sales Document (Quote, Order or Invoice) as well to one or more Purchase Documents (Requisition, Order or Supplier Invoice) on-the-fly. If you have used a prospective Customer Or Item, the system will prompt you to select the Item or Customer or to
Create these on the fly.


Once the Items and Customer has been linked the system will create the Purchase Order on-the-fly and bring through the Sales Quote and Customer Details to trace the document through to fruition.

Receive Goods With Complete Traceability
When goods are received the Created From customer and Order details will be displayed on the Goods Received Voucher and processing screen, allowing you to effectively complete the order fulfilment cycle.

Note that the ability to trace the Document Reference above is also available in all the Create/Copy Purchase Order from Sales Orders function, with each individual copied sales order and customers details listed separately.

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