Electronic Catalog
The TransActPOS Electronic Catalog is the repository for vendor catalogs of available products, automatically referenced to added items to the inventory from various applications depending upon your system's configuration.
With an understanding of how to import catalogs, this single feature can significantly affect how you manage your inventory's retail price and cost.
Data Mapping of Vendor Catalogs
The design of the TransActPOS Electronic Catalog system includes a utility to import files from any vendor that can provide the needed data.
The utility imports the vendor item number, item description, UPC, retail price, cost, and the related unit of measure into the Electronic Catalog.
Vendor Catalogs
The TransActPOS Electronic Catalog is capable of storing over a million records of vendor inventory information. Approximately 50 vendor catalog formats are built-in and available for no additional cost. In addition, a spreadsheet import utility allows you to map data to the electronic catalog structure, thus allowing you access to unlimited sources of columnar data (CSV and Excel Spreadsheets).
In the Inventory Control module, you can search the catalogs on your system for item information from the vendors. Upon locating the item, selecting the Add button enters the item into your store's inventory.
Additional uses of the electronic catalog include referencing the replacement cost during creating a purchase order and updating your inventory's retail price with the vendor/manufacturer's revised retail price.
Adding Items to Inventory
The streamlined addition of inventory to your system is one of the critical components of the Electronic Catalog. The following are a few of the areas that take advantage of this time-saving feature:
Selected Electronic Catalog Additions
Once an item is located within the electronic catalog by various methods, the user may select the Add button to add the item to the inventory file within seconds.
Point-of-Sale Auto-Add
With the appropriate system settings, if an item's UPC is not found within the inventory, the system automatically locates the item within the electronic catalog, adds the item to inventory, and then posts the item to the invoice at the stated catalog retail price.
Purchase Order Auto-Add
While creating a purchase order, the user may choose to add new items from the vendor. The purchase order auto-add option automatically adds items to inventory if the vendor part number entered is found within the vendor's electronic catalog.
Wireless Auto-Add
Within the TransActPOS Wireless application, various inventory-related processes automatically add items to inventory as the product UPC is scanned. Again using the electronic catalog as the data source, the system automatically appends items to the inventory if the UPC is not located in the inventory; however, the UPC is present within the electronic catalog.
Reporting within the system allows management to review the recent inventory additions, and an inventory combine utility allows for merging all related data if duplicate items are determined.
Current Vendor Cost
For items entered into a purchase order, the electronic catalog's cost is used as the replacement cost if an electronic catalog reference is available for the selected vendor. Since the TransActPOS is based upon an average weighted cost calculation, the purchase order's current average weighted cost is used to determine the new average cost of the inventory upon receipt.
Retail Price Updates
The Ecatalog Price Control (EPC) utility is a powerful tool that streamlines the process of updating your inventory's retail price. EPC allows users to update their new retail prices and print new labels, whether the price update is based on the weekly ecatalog update from a communicating vendor or the manual spreadsheet file update from other vendors.
Ecatalog Price Control is a recommended weekly activity for the store to complete to maintain the expected profit margins.
CrossCheck
CrossCheck automatically creates, for each inventory item, the available electronic vendor relationships, the primary and secondary vendor(s) relationships. An item may have an unlimited number of related vendor numbers.