PROMOTE

PROMOTE

Promotion Certificates

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You can use a dummy Sku for promotion certificates and on a sales screen

enter a merchandise Sku at full price and a separate promotion certificate

for the discount. This helps prevent the skewing of the price of the

merchandise. i.e. it's no fault of the merchandise that you discounted it as

it was a merchandise-independent promotion. This also helps you run reports

on the results of the promotion.

Create a major code - say 995 and you'll get a dummy Sku 995-00001.

Further - when you make that major code - give it a repair category of 3.

Normally that's for appraisals, but it basically just means that when you

sell one in that category it won't change the qty.

You can edit that dummy Sku from the 2,8,E screen to give it a "fixed" price

of, say $50 or you can leave it at $0. Either way you can change the value

at the time of sale - but if they are almost always $50, you can save

yourself some time there - but note that it's positive $50, not negative.

You could create different dummy Sku's in this category to reflect the price.

E.g. you could use screen 2,A (Enter Existing Inventory) to create a Sku

995-00050 for a $50 certificate and 995-00025 for a $25 certificate.

Note that at point of sale you can type just 995-50 or 995-25 and the extra

zeros will be filled in for you.

Also note, that as with any major code you can assign a three-letter

mnemonic - such as PRO for Promotion or GC for Gift Certificate. This would

let you type PRO-50 or GC-50 at the point of sale. You assign the mnemonics

from the 8,3,1 Enter/Edit Major Class Code screen.

At the time of sale, you can type in the Sku of the item being sold - and

leave its price as the normal selling price. On the second line you can type

the dummy Sku where you leave the price as positive,  but enter the quantity

as negative.

Note that you can either set the promotion certificate to taxable or

non-taxable. If you consider it more of a discount than a gift certificate

then you could make it taxable so the customer pays tax only on the net

amount. (e.g. $300 item, -$50 discount coupon = $250 + tax)

If you or your tax board consider it more of a gift certificate then you may

need to make it non-taxable so tax is paid on the gross amount (e.g. $300 +

tax minus $50). Whichever you choose you should set it up as the default in

the major code screen (8,3,1) for that major code.

In the case where you set the promotion certificate as normally (reverse)

taxable - you'd have to manually set it to non-taxable in the case of a

non-taxable sale (shipping out of state, non-taxable items, etc).

Further note that when you make sales with such promotions you should

consider using a special DEPT code. This is a 3-letter code near the date

and clerk of the sale. For example you could use C04 for Christmas 2004.

(Note that there is Not a place in Shopkeeper to list official Dept codes-

you just make them up and try to be consistent when adding them to sales.)

This way you can run sales reports from 6,2,3 for that Dept code so you can

see what the results of the promotion were (6,2,3 has a Dept code selection

option) You can run that report in conjunction with or separately from the

major code selection. e.g. If you ran the 6,2,3 report for Dept code C04 and

major codes 1-950 that could indicate all sales made for that promotion -

excluding the certificates themselves. Choosing C04 for major code 995 would

show you the discounts you issued.

Running the 6,2,3 report for major code 995 with and without the C04 option

should be the same - unless someone forgot to put the C04 code on some of

the discounted sales. This can help you track down such oversights.

Gift Card

..........

If you want to give the customer an actual Gift Card or Gift Certificate

you can use the same idea as above, but enter a separate sale with the

special sku number with a minus-one quantity and as you close the sale

issue a gift certificate / gift card.

Remember that it's still a good idea to use a special Dept code when

the user *later* redeems the gift certificate so you can track the

sales results of having given out that promotion.