Miscellaneous Products

A miscellaneous product is a type of product rather than an individual item. For example if you have a product that comes in a range of colours you may wish to enter a miscellaneous product for the range rather than make a product entry for each and every colour.

Miscellaneous products can be used to achieve two effects. The first effect is the ability to nominate the exact product description at sale time. In the colour range example above you may enter a product description of the range without reference to colour (eg. Ford Falcon Sedan). At the time of sale the user would be given access to the product description and be able to modify the description for this product on this sale (eg. Cardinal Red Ford Falcon). In this example the price and cost of the product may not alter. Where this is the case the price and cost would still be entered on the product record. and would thus be transferred to the sale document. Users with the required privilege could still alter these prices at the time of sale if necessary (eg. metallic paint may increase the cost and or sell prices).

The other effect of miscellaneous products is to allow pricing at the time of sale. In this case the description may or may not need alteration. When a miscellaneous item is not given a sell or cost price on the product file then the price is requested at purchase or sale time.

For miscellaneous items with no cost you have three alternatives:

• Cost the item on the sale document.

• Cost the item after the sale using the Miscellaneous Item Costing screen.

• Use the $Cost = \%\ Sell$ field on the product screen to enter a percentage to be used in calculating the cost price from the sell price.

The standard approach is for the cost price to be entered at the point of sale or during order/quote entry. For customer orders that require a purchase order the cost price can be placed on the purchase order any time prior to receiving the goods. This allows the cost price to be transferred to the customer order when the received goods are allocated to the customer order pick quantity.

If by the time of invoicing or cash sale the product on the document has not received a cost price then the sales system will insist on the cost price being entered before the document can be processed against the stock, debtors and sales files. This ensures that all products are processed with cost and sell prices allowing the calculation of gross profit and margins. Note that a users security access can preclude them from being able to enter cost price on a miscellaneous item or from making sales of miscellaneous items at all.

Because cost price is required to calculate the cost of goods on hand all miscellaneous item sales must be costed before leaving a branch that supports its own stock file. To achieve this a sales batch is scanned for uncosted miscellaneous items before it is sent to head office. If there are uncosted items the system permits the running of the Miscellaneous Items Costing screen as part of the send batch process.