Show TOC

Procedure documentationCreating an Order Guide for Repeat Orders

Procedure

When dealing with corporate customers on a regular basis, you may need to repeat an order for the same inventory items on an ongoing basis. For example, if you are running a liquor store you would service a number of hospitality-type customers with the same products every week. Items in the order typically do not change except for minor adjustments to the quantities required.

Store Manager provides a feature for maintaining an order guide and an order entry screen to process repeat orders. The order guide allows you to create a specific standing order for each customer that pre-orders product. The Order Entry screen allows you to create a new order using the predefined order list and view the current selling prices for that customer. You can also see on-hand quantity and on-order quantity for each product in your store. Once complete, the order acquires a pending status for payment processing at a later date—typically when the customer picks up their merchandise.

Before you can set up an order guide for a customer, you must complete the following:

  • Create a record for the customer

  • Ensure that the price level value is set to 1 in the Customer Maintenance window on the Loyalty Points tab. This applies any discount schemes the customer may be entitled to such as discounts for bulk purchases

  • Create an order guide and link it to the customer.

Note Note

You can create several order guides for one customer to reflect seasonal or other variations in their ordering.

End of the note.

To set up a customer to use the order guide feature:

  1. On the Main Menu, click File Maintenance.

  2. Click Customer.

  3. Click Customers.

  4. If you are adding a new customer to the order guide, click New. The Customer Maintenance window appears. Otherwise, if you need to make a change to an existing customer record, you can simply open that record.

  5. Enter contact information for the customer as required.

  6. The Type field specifies the user-defined customer type. Select the required type. Customer types are maintained in the Code Table Maintenance window for Licensee types.

  7. The Status field specifies the customer status. The options are Active or Inactive. Select the required status type. Customer status types are maintained in the Code Table Maintenance window for Licensee status.

  8. You can create a custom reference number for the customer by entering an identifying number in either Reference #1 or #2.

  9. Click the Loyalty Points tab.

  10. Set the Price Level value to 1.

  11. Click Save and then click Exit.

Once you have set up a customer you can begin to create an order guide for them.

To set up an order guide for a customer:

  1. In the Customer Menu, click Order Guides.

  2. If you are opening an existing order guide, select it from the displayed list and click Open, or click New to create a new order guide for a customer.

  3. You must assign the order guide to the customer by entering their identifying number in the Customer # field. If you do not know the customer number, you can look it up by clicking the question mark icon.

    Note Note

    You can create an order guide for licensees with several locations ordering the same group of products by creating a copy of an existing order guide for one licensee and then assigning a new customer number to it.

    End of the note.
  4. In the Guide ID field, enter an identifier to uniquely identify the order guide.

  5. Enter each item to appear in the order guide by clicking the Item field and entering the PLU Number and PLU Description for the item. Current Price/Future Price displays the item’s prices based on the current date. Future Price represents the price that is effective on the earliest configured date after the current date. If an item does not appear in the customer price list, the current retail price from the PLU database is displayed in both the current price and future price.

  6. When you have entered all the items for the order, click Save to save the order guide.

  7. If required, you can print the order guide. To print the order guide, click Print.

Viewing Displayed Information about the Order

When an order guide is complete, the P/T ID field shows the configured pending transaction type, such as Layaway, for the order. After that order is settled and picked up, the status changes to Complete.

You can sort the item list by clicking on any item column header in the Order Guide maintenance window. The list of items is automatically re-displayed in the new sort order. Clicking on the same column again toggles the sort between descending and ascending order. The sort order for a specific order guide is maintained in the picking list report and pending transaction.

Item numbers are automatically sequenced by default. You can manually renumber the sequence.