POS: Sales batching, the hows & whys

Here’s a handy tuto­r­ial for all of yalls that work with prod­uct in the prod­uct data­base, buy­ers, pro­duce team, i’m talk­ing to you here. Part of our back­end sys­tem allows for the cre­ation of prod­uct batches, essen­tially a group of items, for putting on sale all at once and affect­ing price changes on many prod­ucts all at once. The use­ful­ness of this fea­ture is demon­strated on sales changeover days, where buy­ers can cre­ate batches of prod­ucts well in advance of the actual sale, and then just hit a but­ton when it’s time for all of those items to go on sale. And tak­ing those items off sale is just as simple.

Lets walk through the steps involved:

1. First, cre­ate a new batch.
2. Add the appro­pri­ate prod­ucts to that batch with their sale prices.
3. Forc­ing and reset­ting the batch.
4. And finally, syn­chro­niz­ing the lanes.

Step 1: Cre­ate a new batch.

So let’s get started. Firstly, you’ll need to nav­i­gate to the POS back­end (this link only works if you are IN the co-op, or linked up via VPN [and if you haven’t already, you should add this as a book­mark in your own browser]). In the nav­i­ga­tion bar on the left click on Sales Batches as shown above. You’ll now be pre­sented with a list of all the exist­ing batches as well as a form to cre­ate a new batch, we’re going to make a new one.

First option is the Batch Type, there are sev­eral dif­fer­ent options but the only ones we really need con­cern our­selves with are the CAP sale, Other Sale, or Price Change, pick the the right one for your needs. Next our new batch will need a name, I called mine NEW BATCH, you’ll prob­a­bly want to name yours some­thing a lit­tle more descrip­tive, so you can find it again later. And now we pick a start­ing date and an end­ing date. The date fields have a help­ful lit­tle pop-up cal­en­dar that will let you pick dates that way if you like. Or you can hand enter the dates using the fol­low­ing for­mat: YYYY-MM-DD. Click Add and we have suc­cess­fully cre­ated a new empty batch. Ta Da!

Step 2: Adding prod­ucts to your batch

After click­ing the Add but­ton you should be auto­mat­i­cally whisked off to your newly cre­ated, empty batch. Now, to fill this thing up with prod­ucts we need only 2 pieces of infor­ma­tion: A UPC or PLU, and the sale price (or new price if this is a price change).

You can hand-enter or scan in the appro­pri­ate prod­ucts to pop­u­late your new sales batch.

A note on scan­ning: You’ve prob­a­bly aleady noticed while using the hand­held scan­ner that after suc­cess­fully read­ing a bar­code, the scan­ner auto­mat­i­cally hits enter for you. This will be a prob­lem if you scann the bar­code before enter­ing the sale price so: When using the hand­held scan­ner to enter batched items, enter the sale price FIRST and then scan the item SECOND.

You have the option of delet­ing an item from the batch list by check­ing the Delete box next to the item or items you want to remove, then click Sub­mit at the bot­tom of the list.

Another note about enter­ing prod­ucts: Occa­sion­ally you may enter an item into the list and will show up with no descrip­tion or nor­mal price, like so:

This hap­pens when you add an item to the batch that does not have a cor­re­spond­ing entry in the prod­uct DB. The sales batcher takes this info directly from the prod­uct DB. Best thing to do here is to open up a new tab (Apple + T on the Macs or Ctrl + T on Linux), click over to the Item Main­te­nance sec­tion of the back­end and add this errant item to the DB. After you’ve done that you can switch tabs back over to your batch and click Refresh in the browser win­dow (Apple + R on Mac, Ctrl + R on Linux). Your blank item descrip­tion should now no longer be blank.

Once you’ve added all the nec­es­sary items to your batch you are done. For now. The beauty of the batch­ing sys­tem is that you can pre­pare batches as far in advance as you like. So now we just wait until it’s time for those prices we entered to take effect…Ooop! It’s time!

Step 3: Force and/or Reset the Batch

At the very bot­tom of your batch list that you cre­ated there are 2 blue but­tons, Force Batch Now, and Reset Batch Now. These are in essence the on/off switch for this batch. By click­ing on Force Batch Now you will put into affect the new pric­ing that you’ve spec­i­fied in the batch. By click­ing on Reset Batch Now you will cause the batch to revert to the “nor­mal” price.

In the cases of weekly pro­duce sales and monthly CAP sales we will want to make sure that we first RESET the batch that is going OFF sale and then FORCE the batch that is going ON sale. Make sense?

Now there’s only one step left before you have suc­cess­fully cre­ated, filled, and acti­vated a new sales (or price change) batch.

Step 4: Syn­chro­niz­ing the lanes

After reset­ing and/or forc­ing your batches make sure you pay a visit to the syn­chro­niza­tion page so your price changes will be made known to the cash reg­is­ters out on the floor.

NOW.…you are done! That wasn’t so bad now was it?