Supplier catalogues, EPOS software and customer special orders

On of the core feature of EPOS software is the catalogue, or stock file. This is where you hold the records of the product items you sell in your retail business. Normally, you hold only those records which are relevant to your business - the ones you actually sell. However, there are many industries, e.g. spare parts, where huge supplier catalogues are available filled with hundreds of thousands of stock items. Most of these you will never sell. On the other hand, a customer could walk in at any stage and make a special order for one of these obscure items - and you need to be ready to deal with him.

Do not enter every product on your system

What you do not do, is import or setup every possible item available from your supplier. Some EPOS users just do this, because they do not know that there is a better way. Importing your entire supplier catalogue into the EPOS software is a big mistake. Instead of a few thousand product lines, you will suddenly be face with tens, or even hundreds of thousands of product items. The lines that you actually stock will be in a tiny minority, making product search features impossible to use - returning masses of results, with the one or two stocked items buried in the list.

You will also significantly slow down your EPOS system. Most EPOS software isn't used with more than about ten thousand product lines, and if you suddenly ask it to deal with a million product lines, it will more than likely grind to a halt! How about a ten thousand page stock valuation report?

Price maintaining will also become a nightmare. Trying to maintain the price of your product lines is difficult enough, without having to maintain the prices of products you never sell!

Use a proper supplier catalogue function

So what do we do? A customer special order is a type of transaction - to all intents and purposes it is a sales order which is left on backorder, whilst you raise a purchase order for the items from the supplier, and then the customer comes and collects and pays for a later. Each retail business will have different requirements on the payment side e.g. a deposit, and the EPOS software should be very flexible on how it allows you to pay for a special order. To create a special order in your EPOS system, you have to choose the item you want to sell, and this item has to be setup in your product file. Clever EPOS software will allow you to import the entire supplier price list into a separate module, away from the main product file. If a customer asks for a product which is not setup, the EPOS software should allow you to switch to searching in the supplier catalogue instead of the main product file. When you find the item you need to sell, it should then automatically setup the required stock item and put it on the special order. Of course, it should then create the purchase order to the supplier!

Once the customer has collected the special order, the system should give an option to de-activate the product in your stock file. If you are unlikely to sell the item again, it is useful to have it disabled and hidden from view!

Make sure when you choose your EPOS software that your supplier catalogue functional requirements are met. If you are in a retail sector that has large catalogues of rarely sold spare parts then it is a key requirement that this area is properly dealt with in the EPOS software, otherwise your installation will not be a success.