Synopsis:
- How vendor SKUs and vendor catalogue numbers function when placing a vendor order?
- How to track vendor SKUs when you buy the same product from multiple vendors with different SKUs?
- How to assign vendor SKUs from AdvancePro and how to assign them from spreadsheets?
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Webinar transcript
APT University: Vendor SKU Creation
Hello and welcome to AP university – today we’re going to be discussing Vendor Sku configuration. This is the ability to have a separate SKU printed on the purchase order that you send to a vendor when buying goods, which shows the vendor’s internal sku, catalogue number, or reference number for the item. This feature can be configured to have a different sku for each vendor you buy the same item from. So Vendor A can have sku 1234, and vendor B can have a sku 5678 for an item that you track internally as SKU 0987.
We will be taking any questions at the end, so if you have a question feel free to enter it into the live chat available if you’re watching from localhost/apt or on our youtube feed. We do APTU Live every wednesday at 12 noon if you would like to participate, and if you want to learn more about advancepro right now, then you can find a full archive of our APTU episodes on localhost/apt under the resources tab, or on our youtube channel.
So let’s jump into Advancepro, and we’ll go to a new vendor purchase order, you’re going to see immediately that we can enter items by our internal sku, but if we click the dropdown menu, we can easily enter the item by vendor sku. This makes it very handy to look up products that you haven’t labelled with your own sku.
Now lets learn how to add this vendor sku to a product, first, in advancepro itself, by navigating to products >view all products clicking edit – this is also a menu that you will be walked through if you create a new product in advancepro. and opening up the vendor and pricing info tab, now to have a vendor sku, we have to have a vendor for the product, and in general for all non-manufactured items in advancepro, it’s a good idea to always have a vendor assigned.
Now we’ll see when we select a vendor there’s a vendor sku, and a vendor item name field which are set to be the same as internal by default, but we can easily change these to our own values. Now each product keeps a profile for the way it will behave when you purchase it from different vendors, this includes the vendor sku, the name of the product on purchase orders (so it can be different from internal) the unit breakdown, which is used for defining how many of this item are in a case if you order by the case but track by the single item – this is a handy feature for automatic conversions, and finally the cost price of the item. So if we change vendors, we’re able to assign an entirely different vendor sku, product name on purchase orders, unit breakdown and cost price when we deal with that particular vendor.
Once we’re happy with our configuration we can simply click ‘Save and close’
Now lets return to the vendor purchase order by clicking new order on the side navigation bar under the vendor heading. When we choose our vendor and enter the product, you’ll see that our vendor sku displays separate from our internal sku, this will follow through receiving as well, and we can scan to receive by vendor sku, so we can use the vendors barcodes as we receive if we like (please note this is not applicable for shipping)
Next, let’s take a look at how to import this information from an excel file.
What we want as a bare minimum in our excel file is the sku, the product name, the vendor name exactly as it appears in advancepro, and the vendor sku, there are also import columns available for the cost price, unit breakdown, and the product name for vendor orders available if you want to use them.
Once you have a file like this, go ahead and go to admin > utilities, and you’ll want to perform a backup first, keep in mind backups like to live in your advancpro installation folder – program files >advancepro > data) this will give us something to restore back to in case we made any mistakes with the import, now we can navigate to the Excel import export utility, browse for our excel file, and then we can map columns in the excel file to fields in Advancepro. So SKU to SKU, map, product name to product name, map, vendor to vendor, map, and vendor sku to vendor sku, map. You must import a vendor for cost price, vendor sku, vendor product name, or unit breakdown to import. Advancepro needs to know which vendor gets these rules for this particular item.
Finally, go ahead and click next, and here we can review our mappings, if there are any mistakes we can check off the offending line on the left and right and unmap, and click the tabs in the upper left to go back and re-map the file correctly. Finally click import and advancepro will go ahead and update your products.
Something to note about importing products. The first thing advancepro will do is look at the sku field. If it finds an existing sku, it will UPDATE that sku, if it finds a sku that isn’t in advancepro, it will CREATE that sku, excel import cannot be used to delete products, so uploading a partial list of your products won’t remove previous products that aren;t part of the list.
If advancepro sees a vendor that isn’t a perfect match for a vendor that already exists, it will create a new vendor profile just from this. That vendor profile will only have the name supplied here and the product association – this can create duplicates so please be sure that your vendor names are always an exact match.
This concludes today’s tour of the vendor Sku feature in advancepro.