Overview - Item Discounts |
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Note: Some of the information here may seem to be presented too soon, since it appears before the Inventory Item details. It's presented first because it's important to understand discounts before editing inventory records, and because you may want to set up some general discounts before adding your inventory, so you can apply the discounts to the inventory as you add it.
Automatic Price Discounts
The convenience of a P.O.S. system often depends on how quickly and automatically it handles ringing up prices at the check-out counter, and that includes handling sale prices and discounts without special attention by the clerk. While it may not be possible to handle every situation automatically, Campground Master has a very flexible system for automatic discounts for inventory items.
Some of the situations that can be handled with automatic discounts are:
•Fixed-amount off per item (e.g. $1.00 off)
•Percentage off (e.g. 10% off)
•Percentage off after a fixed amount off (e.g. $1.00 off plus an additional 10% off)
•Items discounted only certain days of the week
•Items discounted only on certain dates (e.g. holidays, promotional periods)
•Items discounted based on quantity purchased (with any number of different quantity brackets)
•Items discounted based on the customer's membership or discount category (e.g. club members, seniors)
•Surcharges or separate charges per item, such as bottle deposits
Discounts are set up similar to Rates, such that you define a set of "applies if" conditions and the discount will be automatically used when a purchase is made that meet those conditions.
General vs. Item-Specific Discounts
Every single item in inventory can have different discounts applied as needed -- these are called "Item-specific discounts". This allows the most flexibility, but of course it could involve a lot of work if it required a change to every individual item when you wanted to have a general sale on every item in the store. Therefore there are also "general discounts", which can be used to change discounts for multiple items at once. You still need to add a general discount to each item that it applies to, but the advantage is that the when the general discount is changed (e.g. the sale is canceled or the conditions change), you only need to change the single discount definition and it immediately affects all items.
General discounts are especially useful if you have periodic discounts on groups of items -- for instance an end-of-season 20% off sale. After adding the general discount, perhaps called "End-of-season sale", you would edit each inventory item that it will apply to and add that discount to its list. Presumably that discount will only apply for certain dates. So at the end of next season, all you have to do is adjust the dates for the general discount. You could even change the percentage if you decide to make it 25% off, for instance.
Likewise, you might have a senior discount that applies to some or all items. Maybe that discount is currently 10%, but you want to be able to change it or even cancel it later. Just make a "Seniors" general discount and add it to each applicable inventory item. Then if you need to change it, you only have to do it in one place.
Item-specific discounts would be used for things that can't be generalized, like a specific sale price for an item, or buy 3 get one free (because the amount of the discount would be specific to each item). They can also be used in situations that seem like they could be a general discount (like 10% off), but perhaps you're likely to change the amount of the discount for particular items and don't want to affect them all at once. (Even in this case, if any changes are likely to affect an entire group of items then you could set up multiple general discounts and apply them to items of the appropriate group.)
Multiple Discounts
When an inventory item has multiple discounts selected, there are certain rules for how they are applied:
Item-specific discounts are checked first -- if any item-specific discounts apply, then no general discounts are applied. The item-specific discounts are assumed to override any general discounts. (Thus a 30%-off special item-specific discount will override a 20%-off end-of-season sale.)
Only the first applicable discount found will be used -- multiple discounts will never be applied to a single item. If there are multiple general discounts selected for an item, for instance, it won't use all of them even if more than one could apply. Therefore it's important to arrange them in an order than puts the priority ("better") discounts before "default" discounts (e.g. special season sales should appear before senior discounts, unless the senior discount is better). In addition, it's important to properly qualify discounts using the "Applies if" conditions.
Surcharge exception: Any discounts marked as Surcharges will be added separately from the other discounts -- therefore it's possible to have both a Surcharge and a Discount apply to an item at the same time. (Normally only one Item Discount can apply during a given sale as explained above, but the Surcharge is a special case.) It's limited to one surcharge and one discount, however.
Important: The order in each item's list of applicable discounts is what counts, and they can be rearranged as needed for each item. In particular, remember that the order in which general discounts are listed in the Setup General Discounts dialog does not affect the order they are applied to each item.
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