Synopsis:
- How can I create fees that don’t impact inventory?
- How can I create components for items I don’t track?(MFG)
Webinar transcript
APT University:Service items
Hello and welcome to AdvancePro university, today we’ll be discussing service items and how they behave within AdvancePro.
So within AdvancePro, we have a lot of different types of products, most of which are tracked in inventory. If you visit the view products dashboard you’ll see a variety of icons that denote different settings, such as variant items, manufactured items, and kit items. Today we’ll be discussing one of the items that is not tracked in inventory, the service item.
The service item is used to cover any fee that is not directly linked to a physical good, these might be installation fees, freight fees, or any other fee. These are used in a few different ways in AdvancePro – you can create a freight fee to allow a given vendor to act as a freight provider for tracking landed costs, you can purchase service items from vendors, you can attach service fees to a manufactured good to account for costs or make a note to the manufacturing team who might be using AdvancePro or paperwork from it, or you can provide services to your customers.
To create a service item in AdvancePro, add a new product, and under the TYPE option, select service item.
You are required to add a name and a SKU for this product, and other than tracking stock, this service can behave like any other product in AdvancePro. You can add this item to a customer or vendor order by typing in the sku. Now service items will always be provided, you can’t short-ship them, so you may need to adjust the customer orderorder if you need to add or remove the fees.
You can also add your service item to a bill of materials on an assembly item just like any other item. Go to your assembly item, add a bom item type, and specify your settings, then find the sku for your service item.
This could be a good way to account for water if you’re manufacturing, where a bill of materials or recipe calls for a fixed amount of water, but since you get water from the tap, you don’t need to track the water itself – but you may be paying a utility bill for the water and may wish to track that cost toward your finished good.
You can also use service items as notes on a specific work order, you can do this by starting the work order, and adding the service item on the fly before processing it. This will allow you to give your manufacturing team a note about any special handling, which could include a cost, as opposed to just putting in a transaction note.
So this concludes our brief tour of service items, Thank you for watching!