Synopsis:
- How do I create a kit that bundles several items and sells them together or sell items in case quantities?
- How is kit stock tracked?
- How do I set up vendor purchases to manage buying by the case?
- How can I set up complex units of measure?
Webinar transcript
APT University: Kits, UOM, and unit breakdowns.
Preset: opening slide,
Welcome to AdvancePro University Everyone. Today we’ll be discussing a number of ways to work with products in bulk or to involve multiple units of product in a single SKU.
So we’re going to be covering three closely related tools in AdvancePro – and you might use just one, or a combination of them depending on what you’re doing.
The first Tool we’ll talk about is Kits, Kits are great for selling products as a single and as a case – essentially having a case SKU and a single SKU that both pull the right inventory from the single SKU. You can also use Kits for bundling multiple products, or for light, on demand assembly. It only applies to how you sell product
The second tool we’ll discuss are Unit breakdowns. These address purchasing a product from a vendor in a full case, but then dividing it down into singles once it’s been received. It applies only to how you buy product
The third tool we’ll discuss is slightly more complex – it Called Units of measure – and it deals with both buying and selling as well as manufacturing in quantity – and while we’ll touch on the basics here, we strongly recommend reaching out to your AdvancePro advisor if you’re looking to implement Units of Measure.
(move to AP)
So the first thing we’ll do is discuss Kits – how they work and how they are set up.
To set up a Kit, Go to Products > Item kit, and give your kit a name and a SKU. Kits are a product, and will appear in the products list – but they are not an inventory item, so they won’t appear in the manage inventory window – they just draw inventory from other inventory items.
So in the next tab we have product info and we can add one or more items to the kit. – this is very similar to a manufactured item.
I’ve chosen a single item for our kit today, and I can outline the number of units in the kit – say this product is sold in cases of 5 under this SKU. so our initial cost price is the sum of the components, and we can also add an adjustment for any labour. We could have as many items in this kit as we want, so we can use it to bundle products together, or put all the parts for a light assembly into it.
So I’m going to set a selling price and save, many of the other settings available to kits are the same settings available to standard products.
So now we have a kit product and a standard product that we’ll sell in cases under the kit SKU – if you visit view all products, AdvancePro will provide a stock level – and that’s the amount that we could build with the individual pieces we have on hand. If you need to track how many you’ve actually assembled, then you’re getting into assembly item territory.
So if we were to sell a kit, we can place it on a customer order like any other sku, and when we process it out of the warehouse, we’ll see it on a pick ticket displaying the components of the kit so it’s clear to the picker. We can also disable this listing of the components if it’s not necessary. Something else to note is that we can provide serial numbers for the components, but not for the kit itself– so if you’re doing assembly where you need to track the serial number of the final product, once again you’re going to need the AdvancePro Manufacturing module.
So next we’re going to take a brief look at Unit breakdowns – the unit breakdown is found on the vendor and pricing info tab of any new or existing product. Essentially this is a way to tell AdvancePro that you’re going to order items from the vendor you have selected, in a case quantity so you can buy from one vendor in a case of 10 units, and from another in a case of 12 for example. The cost price that you enter here is the cost of the whole case. You can also change the name and sku of the product as it appears on your vendor order for that vendor from here. On your Vendor Purchase order you just enter the number of cases you want, and the amount is divided back out after you receive the goods – so even at receiving you are marking the cases as received, it’s seamless.
This feature also works with your alert levels and your target quantity, so if you check your reorder alerts when placing an order – AdvancePro actually divides out your recommended quantity by the reorder level for that vendor.
Finally, let’s take a look at advanced units of measure – You’ll find units of measure on a product page under vendor and pricing information. The easiest way to get there is either to add a new product, or go to view products, click E for edit on the right hand edge, and go to the second tab on the bottom row. The UOM button is on the bottom.
Now the classic way to use units of measure is to convert down to a base unit to track items in. So for example, if you order a particular product in 50 pound bags, but want to track the item by the pound, and might be using less than a pound in manufacturing. Then you would create a unit of measure to represent the 50 pound bag.
Something to know upfront is that a unit of measure may behave almost like a whole separate SKU in some cases, so you have to be very careful about how you set this feature up. We recommend heavy consultation with your AdvancePro advisor if you intend to set this feature up – especially if you are a manufacturer.
Here you can see that you can specify a unit of measure as being either just for selling, just for buying, or for both.
So lets walk through how this works. First you can select the unit itself – this is mostly a label – and you can add to this list from admin > Product unit management
Now here you’ll see the unit breakdown again – so this is where you’ll tell AdvancePro how many of the base unit are in this package, in the example of a 50 pound bag, this means you’ll put in 50 if you want to track in pounds, 800 in ounces, or 22679.6 if you’re tracking in grams.
Now you ‘ll see it will calculate the base cost and sale price for the unit of measure for you. You can make adjustments either to the
Discount and mark up fields, or you can manually change the sale and cost price, or the individual unit sale cost.
Be careful if you mark something as the default UOM as that can potentially revise your bills of material for manufacturing or any kits you might have to use one unit of measure when you mean for them to use another – in which case you would have to go back and edit them.
So now when we order the product, it will show that we’re getting a bag of 50, and when we receive, we can receive it either as the bag – this is where I mentioned it can behave like a separate SKU – or we can convert to pounds. So any item with a unit of measure will have this blue icon, and we can click that icon either here in receiving or in manage inventory to convert between different units of measure. When selling – if we set the UOM to be available for sale, we’ll also be able to choose the correct unit for the sale. This is really good for tracking how many whole units you have vs. partial units, but it does mean you need to convert between your units as necessary.
So this concludes our tutorial today.