Buying and Selling by Weight

Synopsis:

How to configure use items that receive catch weights, or that are bought and sold by the pound.

 Webinar transcript

APT University: Buying and Selling by Weight

Hello everyone and welcome to APTU – today, we’re going to discuss some of the key features in advancepro for working with products by weight, including our catch-weighting system, as well as some general tips for using weights and measures.

We will be taking any questions at the end so if you do have a question and you’re watching live, feel free to put it into the live chat to the right if you’re watching on youtube, or just below the video if you’re watching on advanceprotech.com. If you’d like to learn more about Advancepro, we do have our full library of APTU videos available on advanceprotech.com under the resources tab, or on our youtube channel.

First we’ll be showing simple methods to adjust your weights and measures settings for a product using , so you can track some items by the pound, gallon, gram, or any other unit you like, even if you don’t purchase the product in that quantity. Later, we’ll be showing our catch weights, which is typically used in the foods industry if you need to buy and track a case of product, but you always pay and sell the product by its weight

So to start with, we’re going to talk about weights and measures in advancepro. There’s two areas in the admin tab we’ll be talking about, the first is under site settings > general settings and you’ll see we have the default weight measurement, this does not have much to do with any particular item, but it does dictate what weight is to Advancepro, typically if you’re using imperial measurements in the US you would write the abbreviation for pounds, and elsewhere you would write kilograms, but advancepro allows you to choose any measurement type you want, so you could work in ounces or grams or tons.

The next area is a set of labels called product unit measurement which is also in the admin panel, as you’ll see, this is essentially a label that you can put on a product that tells you what constitutes one of that product, it could be an each, it could be a pound, it could be a Ton, it could be a case, it’s just a label. But if you do have some products you track by the package, and some that you track by the pound, this label lets you sort out which products are tracked by which method.

So now that we have our basic settings, lets go to the product setup by going to view all products and clicking the E button for Edit. this is also the basic screen you would walk through when adding a product. Here you can see that you can select a unit measurement type from our list, and also list the weight relative to your default weight type in advancepro, so for example if you wanted to track in grams, but your default weight was in kilograms, you would choose the grams option from the list, and put 0.001 as your weight per unit. If you want to track by pounds and your default weight is pounds, go ahead and choose pounds from the list, and set your weight as 1, which is the default value.
So the other feature I’ll mention before we move on is the unit breakdown feature. Lets say you purchase from a vendor in a 50 pound sack, and you want to track the product by the pound. You can set this up under the Vendor and pricing info tab.

Here we can set a profile for each vendor we purchase the product from, including the format they sell it to us in, typically we can use unit breakdown for this as it does any unit conversions automatically. So if you buy a product in a 50 pound format, go ahead and put 50 in the unit breakdown, and every unit you order in a vendor order for this product with the selected vendor, will convert to 50 units after you receive it. This is also very convenient for receiving since they only need to count or scan each sack, as opposed to multiplying everything out. For more complex purchasing and selling relationships, take a look at our video on Advanced Units of measure.

I should also mention that if you’re working in very small quantities for manufacturing, we do have a limitation of 3 decimal places on Bills of Material, so you may choose to track very small quantities in a very small unit.

Now we’ll be moving on to catch weights, This feature is designed for the food industry where you might receive a case or unit of product, and want to know how many cases you have, but the price you pay for the product is always calculated by the weight of the product.

Before we go into setting up a catch weighted Item, I want to recommend enabling a custom field for the static price per pound of this item, since advancepro will adjust the pricing of the item by the price per pound to give you the average price per case of product for any given order. This is done under the admin tab, in site settings, under custom fields and you can see here I’ve set this up as custom field 2 and enabled it on all documents.

Now lets go back to our product setup to enable catch weights on an item go to edit, you can set the unit measurement setting to whatever you like, in this case I’ll choose a box. And go ahead and set your weight to an approximate average weight, since we’ll be setting the weight manually as we ship and receive the product. Under your pricing, set the cost and sale price per pound, or per weight unit you want to be working with.

Now to enable the catch weight feature itself, go to the additional info tab and check the box for ‘catch weighted item’, I’m also going to encourage you to put the base weight per pound into th custom field we made under the custom fields tab.

Now lets walk through the purchasing and receiving stages to see how this is different

I’m going to start an order with a vendor, add our product, and under quantity, I’m going to set the number of cases I’ll be ordering.

From here we can send the purchase order to the vendor or print it out. For more details on this process, take a look at our full video on the purchasing, receiving, and billing process.

So now we’ll just place that order and send it on to the warehouse to be received.

At this stage, we can go ahead and open up the warehouse and open up our order and we’re going to walk through the receiving process.

Now we can do this manually, which is how I’ll do it today, or we could scan a barcode on the product with all the necessary information, which might include a lot number, an expiration date, a quantity, etc, and this would do all the data entry for us. Here, I’ll go ahead and enter the number of cases I’ll be receiving, and then i can click on the order weight to change the weight

When we open up the assign weight popup, we can enter the total weight for the line item and it will average out, or we can click the calculator button to enter the individual weights for each unit.

Now the weights that we record as we receive will affect our bill, and the exact same process is used as we ship, so as we ship, the invoice will be affected similarly to reflect the weights that we actually shipped to our customer

So now if we go to our vendor bill, we can see our cost per pound, that’s the custom field we set, we see the ordered amount, the received amount, and the price per unit (which has doubled since in this case each unit we received was two pounds), and a total. You’ll also see your weights displayed in the lower left.

This means that as someone purchasing or selling products with catch weights you can pay your vendors and collect from your customers with confidence, knowing that your billing and invoicing reflects the products as you shipped them.

This concludes today’s tour of weights and measures in advancepro.