Product Categorisation

Besides product grouping there are two other ways in which you can categorise products. The first is the product type pulldown list. This list can be defined for what ever purpose you see fit (See Pulldown Lists for details on how they work). Typical examples of product types are:

• Standard - standard products.

• Specials - products currently at a special price.

• Seasonal - products that sell mainly during a season (eg. Winter, Summer).

• Discontinued - products no longer to be stocked but still being sold off.

As you can see there are many ways this field could be used. Keep in mind that this field can be used to limit reports, price changes and other update runs. For example to have a half price sale on selected products you may decide to step through the product file setting those products you wish to mark down to a specific product type (eg. "Half Price"). Then you select all products from the pricing screen selecting product type "Half price" and issue instructions to change the required prices by -50%. This will halve the nominated prices for those products you have just placed in that product type. Later you can restore the normal price by repeating the same process using a change of 100% percent.

The other category you can use is the options field. This is an eight character field that can be used as a set of eight switches. You decide what you wish to use each character for. Then you enter the desired character for each position on each product. Take the following example:

Position	Meaning	Possible settings
1	Top 100	T - in top 100, (Blank) - not in top 100
2	Stocktake Cycle	M - monthly, Y - yearly, Q - quarterly
3	Customer Price List	A - all, D - dealers, (Blank) - No price list
4-8	Unused

The above settings may be used to produce a product sales report for the products you have nominated as the top 100 products. It could be used to produce a report of products to be stocktaken this month. It can also be used to produce a top 100 product price list for dealers.