We have users in this industry ranging from four workstations and three printers with one location to sixteen workstations and sixteen printers with multiple locations. Regardless of the size of the organization the user's business functions are very similar.

Walk in retail trade that is often the "do it yourself" homeowner and the wholesale customer is often a contractor working on multiple projects. PROMPT provides up to 8 price levels for different types of customers such as (1) Retail, (2) Contractor, (3) Distributor, (4) School or Government, (5) Employee, etc. You define the prices for each product line that can be markdown from list or a markup from cost to calculate the individual SKU prices.

In addition special customer pricing can be defined, by product line and if required even to the SKU level. For example a contractor customer that buys a lot of paint might get price level 2 on all items except paint and get price level 3 on paint. An alternate approach can be to give the customer price level 2 on everything but an additional 5% off on paint.

Governments and sometimes large customers offer bids on products and make an award for 1 year to purchase a product or products at a specific price during this period. We call this contract pricing and you it is set up by SKU, or product line, with a termination date for the contract price. Once this contract price is defined for this product and customer it will remain at this price until the contract period is up regardless of what other changes are made to the pricing of the SKU, in general or for other customers.

A customer specific price list can be printed and if you have pending price changes keyed or downloaded into the system, but not yet updated for use because they have a future effective date, these new prices will reflect on the price list based on the effective date used to print the price list.

Pricing override is available when processing a quote or sales order, but can be turned off by user workstation or across the board for common user sessions.

When the invoice is closed the contractor's job name can be entered that will allow the contractor's accounts receivable statement to be printed sequenced and subtotaled by job.

Buying, both for stock and special orders is efficient with PROMPT. There are actually four buying methods. MIN, MAX, EOQ or SLS. MIN and MAX simply means you set by SKU the minimum or maximum quantity to stock, and when you generate recommended orders if the stock level is below this value the difference is ordered. Of course the difference is adjusted for vendor minimum requirements, if applicable.

The EOQ method means "Economic Order Quantity" and this method requires an order point and order quantity for each SKU. When "generate recommended purchase orders" is run, if the stock level is at or below the order point the defined order quantity is recommended.

The SLS method has two uses. First, it can be used to restock based on sales. For example you can generate recommended purchase orders for a past time frame and have the system order stock based on what was sold during the specified time frame. Second, and very different is using this method in connection with special orders. When a special order is sold at point of sale it can be sold with or without taking a deposit on the sale. You can generate recommended purchase orders for all special orders for the day, or one special order at a time to order this stock.

When the stock is delivered the purchase orders are cross-referenced to the special sales orders. Therefore, the stock is easily identified for delivery or pickup by the retail customer or contractor.

The PROMPT Business System features explained herein are not unique to an electrical and building supplier - they are available to all PROMPT users!

It is important to understand that these PROMPT Business System users enjoy the other features of the software explained under all other industry segment headings of this web page and on the Products web page.