Synopsis:
- How can I create or edit a record in AdvancePro?
- How are customers, vendors, and products linked?
- How can I put customers in groups and products in categories?
Webinar transcript
APT University: How to Create/Edit a Product, Customer or Vendor
Hi Everyone, Welcome to AdvancePro University. Today we’ll be discussing how to create or edit a customer, product or vendor. If you have any questions during this presentation we will be addressing them at the end, feel free to enter them into the questions tab on your gotowebinar panel.
So in AdvancePro we have these 3 major lists of items and records that don’t deal with transactions. Products customers and vendors. These are vital for doing business in AdvancePro. Today we’re going to create one of each and show you how they connect to each other.
All of these records can also be created or updated from spreadsheets, For more information on this, take a look at our previous videos on localhost/apt under the resources tab.
Let’s start with a Vendor – this is going to refer to anyone who sells you products or services.
So to look at our vendors, we can go to the vendor tab, or we can follow our quick links on the left hand bar to view all vendors. To edit an existing vendor, you can click the E button on the right hand side, this stands for Edit.
To add a new vendor, we can go to the vendor tab and click on add vendor, this creates a blank vendor profile
So for a vendor, a lot of these are going to be very similar to a customer, the only required field here is going to be the Vendor name. But we do recommend that you add an account number – this makes it much easier to edit the vendor later on. The email you put in the the Primary email field is going to be the default email for sending documents to this vendor.
In the next tab, you’re going to see address options for billing and shipping addresses, you can add as many addresses of either type as you like, so this way you can easily deal vendors or customers who might have multiple warehouses or locations.
Under the additional info fields, you can make some settings to how taxes are applied, currency settings, and QuickBooks settings – so you can actually have a different vendor name in your QuickBooks for example.
The next tab allows us to assign products that this vendor sells us. In order to purchase products you do need to associate those products with vendors. Generally I recommend doing this from the product itself because it will also allow you to bring in the vendor’s prices for those products.
The remaining tabs are for reporting and vendor management, allowing you to see your back orders and purchase orders with that vendor, and allowing you to see vendor bills.
So that’s a quick summary of Vendors, let’s move forward to Products.
So we can add products from our quick links bar on the left or from the products tab, if we view all products we can edit a product in the same we could using the E button.
Every product needs a name and a unique SKU, you can add the weight, unit measurement,, UPC and two optional descriptions at the bottom – and here you’ll see these are intended for B2B and B2C capabilities. So this can all tie to our B2B, B2C and Sales Rep Web Services, as well as to any service like Shopify or Woocommerce using AdvancePro Connects Services. The unit measurement is a label that tells us what you consider 1 of this product to mean. It could mean a single pound or gallon, or it could be a single package or unit, you can add to this list of labels using the product unit management settings under the admin panel.
The next tab is Vendor and pricing info, this is where we can assign one or more vendors to product – if you don’t assign a vendor to a product, you’re going to see this red pac-man icon that marks the product as incomplete.
So we choose our vendors from the list by clicking assign vendor, and one way to think about this page is that each vendor gets a profile for the way you buy the product from them. So in this case, you can choose the name the product will have on the vendor order – which might be different from the name you give it internally, the SKU for the vendor, if they keep a different catalogue number than you do, the unit breakdown, which is the quantity in a case if you order by the case.
So essentially, the unit breakdown will allow you to say, when I buy from vendor A – I’m actually buying a case of 10, you put in the cost price for that case of 10, and AdvancePro will receive that case as 10 units, and divide your per-unit costs down so you can turn around and sell the product in eaches. For more complex unit conversion, you can also use the advanced units of measure module, which we’ve covered in other videos.
You can also set the default selling price, as well as any volume discounts for purchasing and selling on this screen.
The next tab, additional info, allows you to set reorder levels and target stock, lets you set the item name in QuickBooks, allows you to change Picking location settings if you’re using them, as well as allowing you to configure the dimensions and the pick, pack, and ship times for the resource management tool.
The next tab we’ll discuss is the variants tab, this is where you can set up apparel type items where a product might have variations in color and size.
Next you’ll see customer pricing, this is one of the many ways we can put in a special discount that a customer gets for a given item.
Finally you’ll see we have serial number management, images (which can be uploaded to our webservices), cross seller selection, reporting on commissions , and PDF upload.
Once you’ve created and item and linked to to a vendor you can begin purchasing that item and tracking stock.
Finally lets talk about creating a customer. As I mentioned earlier, customers and vendors have very similar data. One handy trick is that there is a customer default notes setting available under your site settings in admin, so you can have something you put in the notes field automatically print on your sales orders and on your invoices.
So once again we have the customer company name and account number, contacts and email addresses, we also have the address info tab, when we get to the additional info tab, we have the default shipping warehouse and preferred shipping methods options, this allow you to set up the most efficient shipping routes for your customer if you have multiple warehouse capabilities. In payment info we have some QuickBooks settings available as well as default information about credit card or check payments. The remainder of these tabs are for reporting and upkeep, such as a back order report, order info and invoice info report, and down at the bottom we have a place to set sales goals and to enter CRM notes. Finally we have login management for B2C or B2B websites.
So this concludes our tour of creating or editing the Products, customers and vendors in AdvancePro.