Product Maintenance

Products represent the items you sell, whether you sell a product by pressing a button on the PoS screen, by entering a code, or by scanning with a barcode. All Products have a unique code number which is used to register sales against it. The product maintenance screen is where you manage the products you stock and sell. In a basic sense, where you add, edit, and delete your products, but also provides a lot of additional functionality. 

The product can be added/edited here individually, or in batch, and can be added completely fresh or based upon either another product or a product template, in order to speed up product creation and management.  

If you hover under Products and select this option (Screenshot 2.1).

(Screenshot 2.1)

This will take you into the Product Maintenance page which works in the same way as the desktop version of Total Control Premier shown (Screenshot 2.2).

(Screenshot 2.2)

If you click on ‘View products’ which will open up the Product maintenance page to display the list of your products on your system and give you an overview of the main product maintenance.

On entry to the screen, the system will load in all your products, which may take a few seconds dependent on the number of products in the system.

(Screenshot 2.3)

You will notice your PLUs from the desktop version of Total Control Premier will appear in the cloud which will allow you to add new products, edit current PLUs or delete products in the cloud which will update on the desktop version and vice versa displayed (Screenshots 2.4 & 2.5).

(Screenshot 2.4)

The view of your products given by this screen is also highly customisable. Whilst this screen can show all your products in a list, it also provides functionality for multiple ‘filters’. Filters can be combined with ‘grouping’ and ‘sorting’ to facilitate searching for a product, and display that information to you in a more manageable way.

(Screenshot 2.5)

You will see a list of options which will allow you to toggle filtering functionality to adding new or editing current products to filtering and sorting. Here is a breakdown if you hover over each of the icons which is explained in the chart below (Screenshot 2.6).

(Screenshot 2.6)

If you highlight a PLU and click on the edit icon or double click which will take you into the editing options (Screenshot 2.7).

To select a range of products to Batch Edit

1. Click on the first line that you want to select
2. Hold down the shift key
3. Whilst holding down the shift key, click the last line that you want to select.

4. Followed by clicking the batch edit symbol

5. This will take you into the editing options as below;

(Screenshot 2.7)

You will see a group of options from Editing costs, Editing stock, Mixtures/linked, Outer Pack, User Fields, Product Image, Price Levels, Supplier References, POS Options and Miscellaneous (Screenshot 2.8)

(Screenshot 2.8)

For Example, if you click into the ‘Edit Stock’ section this will allow you to make changes which open below the menu block (Screenshot 2.9).

(Screenshot 2.9)

Once you have completed the changes you will notice in the bottom right-hand corner the option to click ‘Save’ or ‘Save & Close’ or, you can ‘Cancel’ the request if you don’t need to make changes (Screenshot 2.10). By clicking ‘Save’ will keep you within the PLU to continue editing, if you click ‘Save & Close’ this will take you back to the PLU listing.

(Screenshot 2.10)

Product Statuses and Status Filters

From the drop-down menu you can change the product status as follows;

(Screenshot 2.11)

Every product in the database has a ‘status’ field, which will be set to one of the following:

• Normal - Product is in a normal state.
  
• Include Deleted Products – Product has been deleted, but the deletions have not yet been sent to all POS.
  
• Deleted – Product has been deleted, and the deletion has been sent to all PoS.
  

Filters

By default, the Product Maintenance screen lists all the products in your database for the site selected. If you select ‘Toggle Filtering’, if you wanted to filter by a product name, in my example searching for cherries would show as follows only showing the wording containing ‘cherries’.

Sorting by Fields

By default, the product maintenance screen lists all the products in your database, ordered by ‘Product Code (Ascending)’. 

This lists the products starting with the lowest code, for example, 1,2, 10, 100 etc.

You can sort the data by any of the fields available by hovering over the column header and set in either Ascending (0-99, A – Z etc.) or Descending Order (99-0, Z – A etc.) as is shown in the examples below:

Showing the product maintenance screen with its default sorting of ‘Code (Ascending)’ (1-3)

(Screenshot 2.12)

To Customise view (Columns on the main screen)

(Screenshot 2.13)

(Screenshot 2.14)

List of Columns that can be added to the product Maintenance screen

Linking PLUs

Configuring linked PLUs which are sharing stock and how to go about this.

• Under the Product Maintenance If you click edit on the PLU and select ‘Mixture / Linked’ option from the menu.
  

(Screenshot 2.15)

• Within the Product Link field if you click on the ‘Search’ magnifying glass.
  

(Screenshot 2.16)

• You will now able to see the linked products search criteria screen appear.
  

(Screenshot 2.17)

• Clicking ‘Search’ Again which will launch a linked product pop up where you can search for the product you are looking to link to.
  

(Screenshot 2.18)

Once the PLU is selected if you click ‘Accept’ followed by ‘Save’. You will now notice on the PLU this has added an extra box called ‘Linked to’ when editing the PLU as follows;

(Screenshot 2.19)

Profit Warning

Within the editing costs you can set ‘Minimum Profit Percent’ & ‘Maximum Profit Percent’, for example, if you set both these fields as 2 and 2, the system will give you a warning (Screenshot 2.20).

(Screenshot 2.20)

By clicking correct this will correct the Profit Percent or you can allow if you needed or click undo to re-enter the correct figures.

To Refresh the Browser Screen

• F5 – Refreshes the product details shown on the screen.
  
• Shift + F5 – Refreshes the product details shown on the screen.