I speak under correction, but did Inventory Kits not automatically add the price of the individual inventory items. I could be wrong, but when I started using Inventory Kits I am sure that it added the sale price of each inventory item to the total sales price?
Secondly, if I want to build a computer consisting of motherboard, cpu, case etc I can select those items from inventory items within inventory kit. However, if I need to select a non inventory item such as 3 year warranty for computer (which would be in sales invoice items as its not an inventory item that I buy), I cannot select anything from sales invoice items. I can only select from inventory items. I will have a look at the manufacturing orders to see if this will allow me to select from inventory and from sales invoice items, but I am not really manufacturing anything.
I cannot see the logic in having inventory kits not being able to calculate the combined cost of the selected inventory items. I think it should be able to default to the sales cost of the combined sales price of all inventory items selected and provide the end user the ability to either change the sales price manually or to input a discount on the sales price. Right now I have to go through the inventory and add each sales price on my calculator and then put in the final sales price. I presume that this is not the way that its meant to be as I can see errors creeping in as users miss an inventory item or calculate the purchase price not the sales price by mistake!
Maybe it makes sense for your business but generally inventory kit will have its own price.
For example, in McDonalds you can buy burger, chips and coke separately or you can buy a meal (inventory kit) which is priced for less than if you would buy all those items individually.
Or in some businesses, inventory kit could represent an assembled product which took time to create. So inventory kit would be sold for more than the sale price of individual components.
Yes, you are not manufacturing anything. That’s why “manufacturing orders” have been renamed to “production orders” which is more generic term.
By the way, when you are assembling new computer for customer, don’t use inventory kit or production orders. Simply invoice customer for all your components separately + labor. Not need to complicate the workflow with inventory kits and production orders. Inventory kits are useful for repeatable sales (think of McDonald’s meals) and production orders are useful when you are producing new inventory items from components and these new items are going to be sitting in inventory until sold (think of a factory which is manufacturing items on daily basis whether there is a customer or not)
What problem are you having with inventory kit? All you do is create a new inventory kit in settings. Select your inventory items and give it a name and price. Then when you want to sell that kit, you just select the name of the kit from your sales on inventory in the drop down.
Your Macdonalds example is actually very similar to the way my company works. I will be selling chips, hamburgers and coke for less than what I would sell individually. In addition I will be charging for making the hamburger and chips. My point is that you already have a price in inventory of £1 for chips, £2 for hamburger and £1.50 for coke and .50 pence for cooking hamburger and chips. So you have a sales price of £4 for the total of individual items. So now you want to knock off 20% if the client buys the meal together. So in inventory kit you have the combined sales price of £4 and you have a discount or markup calculation field to reduce or increase the price accordingly.
Using my method will solve a number of problems:
Your purchase cost of hamburger price changes - your purchase price goes up, so your sales price must go up. When you change your inventory item purchase price and sales price it automatically updates the Sales total in inventory kit. Would be brilliant if the individual inventory sales price was updated based on markup of purchase price.
The program automatically calculates everything for you and the only thing that you have to do is change the discount or markup in inventory kit. Otherwise if you have a long list of items such as oil filter, fuel filter, oil 50w, air filter etc etc - you need to manually add up each item sales price and then apply the discount that you want for inventory kit sales price. The minute you need to manually add - you run the risk of making mistakes.
You may not want to apply any discount - perhaps what you want is to sell the customer the correct oil, air filter, fuel filter for their car - so you create an inventory kit with a list of the inventory items that are suitable for their car. You may want the individual sales prices and all you are really doing is group the inventory items for convenience.
The program could even allow you to manually overwrite the field contents with whatever sum you want to put in if users do not want to use the discount/markup field. Manager already supports this as I can change the quote price for a product in sales quote even though it automatically fills in with the price contained within inventory items
I fully understand that you need to design the inventory kit to work for as many users as possible. What I am saying is that by using the method I suggested you are actually making the inventory kit more usable for a wider audience. It will allow the price to remain identical to individual inventory items or to be marked up or marked down by an amount or percentage and if the individual inventory items change or their prices change the program can automatically recalculate the inventory kit sales price. In addition, giving users the ability to overwrite the calculated sales price in inventory kit means that people can put whatever they want in there.
Using your method everything is manual which means mistakes can occur even in your hamburger example as you could transpose the digit. My thinking is automate as much as possible, while still allowing people to override the automated return.
I need to use inventory kit for computers, because what I am doing is the following:
I want to allow my clients to see the price of the computer - they don’t need to know about motherboards etc especially if I am quoting projectors and whiteboards and laptops etc on the same quote.
I need to be able to group that CPU with that Motherboard and that Memory and that size hard drive, not just for one quote but for many different clients and quotes. Inventory Kit allows me to do this!
I need to take the individual inventory items and apply a discount to them so that the markup of the computer is always near a set amount. Using the method I suggested above in the hamburger example will allow me to do this.
Production Orders seem to work, the only problem is when you invoice you have to enter the final product made of the inventory items manually. I must say with regards to inventory, it does deduct the stock as per what was used in the production order.
The sale price doesn’t show when viewing inventory kit but when you are issuing sales invoice and select inventory kit, sales price will be automatically put into Amount field on invoice. That’s the purchase of sale price, to be automatically filled out on invoice.
