Tip of the Month for January 2010
Frequently Purchased Items
Frequently
Purchased Items allows Answers to build a list of items for
each customer that they buy the most often. Answers
can review the Invoice History for a specified period of
time and build a list of items the customer purchased within
that time frame The list of items can be viewed in
Customer Maintenance and Customer Inquiry as well as in
Order Entry. Additionally, if you are using the
Answers Online Web Order Entry System, customers can view
their list of Frequently Purchased Items and select items
from that list to add to their shopping carts. For
customers with specific needs, you can manually build a list
of Frequently Purchased Items through Customer Maintenance
that is viewable in Order Entry and on the web.
- The
Frequently Purchased Items list holds up to 100 items.
- When
entering a Sales Order or Quote for a customer,
right-click in the Stock # field and select Frequently
Purchased Items to view the customer's list of most
often purchased items. You can select an item
from this list to be placed on the current sales order
or quote.
- On the
web, customers have a button for Frequently Purchased
Items. Additionally, you can set up a
customer's login to automatically display the Frequently
Purchased Items first when they begin a new order.
Customers can add items to their shopping cart directly
from the Frequently Purchased Items list.
- By
default, Frequently Purchased Items are updated for each
customer automatically. You can use Customer
Maintenance or Customer Mass Maintenance to set a
customer or a group of customers to a "manual" update,
where you manually build the list of frequent items.
- In the
Answers Configuration, under Order Processing > Advanced
Options, #128 lets you control the number of months
invoice history is reviewed. #129 - #133 give
you additional options to control how nonstock items,
kits and kit components are handled, ranking items based
on units or dollars sold, and even excluding certain
items from the list.
- To
enable Answers to review invoice history and update the
Frequently Purchased Items list either nightly or
monthly, go to System Management > Answers Software
Maintenance > Batch Processing Data Entry, click on
either the Daily Tasks or the Monthly Tasks List.
Find the Frequently Purchased Items Update and
enable it (it is near the bottom on both lists).