Chapter 16. Inventory
Prism 1.14.7 User's Guide Chapter 16. Inventory PDF
Prism 2.0 User's Guide Chapter 16. Inventory PDF
Prism's Inventory area helps you track, find, add, edit, and group your merchandise in a convenient and efficient manner. The inventory area can contain up to 999,999 unique items.
Instead of adding items one by one, retailers frequently group their merchandise into families of related items, referred to as styles. Prism's Inventory area enables you to view and work with Inventory as Item Details or Style Details and easily switch between them.
Items can be tracked by UPC or ALU and individual units or groups can be tracked by Serial Number and Lot Number.
Prism includes powerful pricing tools:
Price Levels: Each price level represents a complete set of inventory prices. Useful for things like separate prices for VIPs, Employees, etc.
Price Rounding and Adjusting: Fine tune prices to always end in a certain value (e.g. .99)
Price Manager: Adjust the prices of a group of items by a certain amount or percentage.
Max Discount Percentage: Limit the percentage of an item's price that can be discounted.
Inventory Management Considerations
Basic Functionality:
Each store has its quantities updated by its documents.
Any parent in the enterprise to which those documents are replicated will also update its quantities for the origin site based on those documents.
Depending on how replication is set up this could be to a site's direct POA, or all the way to the RA.
Depending again on how the enterprise is set up there may also be replication inventory down from a POA or RA to the site, and that data would overwrite the data in the store.
Here are some questions regarding Inventory Management to consider when configuring Prism.
Does Merchandise Arrive at Store Pre-Tagged, or Does Store Print Tags?
If merchandise tags need to be printed at individual stores, you can create the tag designs using Document Designer. You can then assign a default tag design to individual items. Note: You can also assign a tag design to an entire department. This is useful for items such as jewelry, which have smaller tags than other items.
Does All Merchandise Have a UPC?
UPC is the standard method for tracking inventory items in Prism. You can enter the UPC for individual items.
How is Merchandise Tracked? By Item? By Style? By Serial/Lot Number?
Prism makes it easy to track inventory using a variety of methods.
You can simply import/create a list of individual items. You can also group related items into styles. A style is a group of inventory items that possess similar characteristics, but vary in size, color, or some other attribute. For example, a sweater that is sold in four sizes and two colors comprises a style of eight items. For items such as cellular phones and bicycles, you can track items by serial number. For items such as pharmaceuticals, you can track items by lot number, including expiration dates.
What type of Style Descriptions Are Used?
Retail Pro provides four description fields for each item (Description 1-4). When using styles, you can select which description field to use for the style description: Description 1, Description 2, or Both.
Are Alternate Lookups Used?
Some retailers use a different tracking system than UPC. These alternative identifiers can be entered in each item's ALU (Alternate Lookup) field. You can optionally copy the description information in an item's Description 2 field to the ALU field.
Is the Same Item Purchased from Multiple Vendors?
You can assign multiple vendors for each item in the Multi-Vendor table in RIL Management. This enables you to view information such as each vendor's Order Cost, Lead Time, and other information, so that you can make the best decision when ordering.
User-Defined (Custom) Fields Needed?
Prism provides up to 16 user-defined fields in which you can store custom information. Two of the fields are date fields, the rest are text fields.
What Tax Codes Are Assigned to Items?
You define each of the tax codes that are required by your tax jurisdiction in Admin Console > Preferences & Settings > Node Preferences > Taxes. You can then assign any of these tax codes to items.
Do You Use Sales Commissions/Salesperson Incentive Fees?
Commissions are currently not available in Prism; however, this feature is scheduled for a future release. In RIL Management you can define a commission schedule and assign a commission rate to employees and a commission code to items so that the correct commission is automatically recorded for the employee when the item is sold. You can also define a salesperson incentive fee (SPIF) for items. A SPIF is a set amount, usually provided by the manufacturer, to be paid to the associate for each sale of an item.
Inventory Cost Consideration
Preferences that can influence Cost
The 2 preferences below and their functions are important with regards to understanding how they might influence inventory cost. They are both found in Admin Console > Node Preferences > Purchasing.
| Preference | Description |
|---|---|
| Cost to use for POs and Voucher | This is simply the pre-populated cost in the Cost field on a new voucher. Possibly settings are Inventory cost. For any Voucher or PO, the ‘Cost' field will display the Inventory cost. Order cost: For any Voucher or PO, the ‘Cost' field will display the Order cost. Order Cost: The ‘order cost' value is initially populated from Inventory cost (when an item is new). After that, it displays the ‘cost' value of the last PO/Voucher |
| Inventory costing method | The mechanism used to value the company inventory The ‘Cost' field on POs/Vouchers can affect cost of an inventory item if that cost is different than the current inventory cost. Options are: ‘Leave' - Do not let a different cost on a PO or Voucher affect the inventory cost ‘Overwrite' - Overwrite the Inventory Cost with the Cost on the PO/Voucher ‘Average' - Modify the inventory cost to be an average between the current inventory cost and the PO/Voucher cost. Calculation for Inventory Costing Method ‘Average' The basic calculation is: InvnC$ = [(invnC$ * InvnQty) + (VouC$ * VouQty)] / [InvnQty + VouQty] Example: Inventory Item 555 has a qty of 5 and a current inventory price of $5. On a new voucher, we are receiving a qty of 10 with a new cost of $4.75. Our new Inventory cost (InvnC$) for item 555 will be: [($5 * 5) + ($4.75 * 10)] / [5 + 10] => [$25 + $47.50] \ 15 => 72.50 / 15 = $4.83 Had the Inventory Costing Method in the above example been ‘Overwrite', the new Cost$ would simply have been $4.75 |
To access Merchandise-related features, click the Retail Pro button and select Store Operations.
Click the Merchandise button. A set of buttons provides access to the following sub-areas:
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Inventory | Manage inventory items. You can filter and search the inventory list to display only the item(s) you are looking for. |
| Physical Inventory | Use Physical Inventory to record physical counts of the merchandise in the store. (Note: PI sheets must be updated in RIL Prism Management) |
| Vendors | Vendors are the companies that retailers order merchandise from. Define the vendor contact info, account number and other information. If items are sold by multiple vendors, you can enter each vendor's UPC (or ALU), item cost, and the vendor code in RIL Prism Management. In Prism, you can list the item using the Alternate vendor info, if configured in preferences. |
| Departments | Manage departments. Departments are used to group items (e.g. Womens Travel Shirts). |
| Cost Adjustment Memo | Create a new cost adjustment memo |
| Price Adjustment Memo | Create a new price adjustment memo |
| Quantity Adjustment Memo | Create a new quantity adjustment memo |
| Adjustment Memo Lookup | Search for adjustment memos by a variety of criteria such as Memo Type. |
| Price Manager | Use Price Manager to create markdowns (or markups) of a selected group of inventory items (or all items). |