Product Deals - effective dates and practicalities

Hi there,

After having reviewed current Product Deals functionality, I make the following observation around the effective dates and some limitations that arise in the design of the system, with a request for improvement in this area. Note that this is not in a B2B sense - but running it all from Cin7 Core UI.

Problem
The problem we are having is that Product Deal discounts only automatically apply if the sale order is created during the deal period. For example, if you have a promo going for March (1-31 March), the system date/the day you are entering the order must be in this period.

I have clients who will run promos for a period, and they encourage forward orders from customers so customers take advantage of a deal. This will mean that orders will arrive in, say, February in this example. My client wants to be able to have their staff enter these orders received, and have the Deals/Promos automatically apply to the order.

However, because the creation date of the Sale Order may be, say, 22nd February, the March promo will not automatically apply, even if we change the sale order date to a date inside the deal period. Our only option is to wait until 1 March to physically create and enter the sale order. This is not suitable because we want to use the demand planning aspect of the system so that on 1 March we are ready to ship and invoice manufactured product, and we need to know in advance our sales demand in order to carry this out effectively.

This means that my client would not be able to effectively automate using this functionality. The only way deal discounts apply if you are entering an order outside of the deal period is if you are using a coupon with the sale, AND your sale order date is forward-dated into the period. This is not suitable for us because we may have multiple deals with multiple coupons going on and you can only have one coupon per sale order.

Possible Solution

One possible solution to this is to introduce a toggle in General Settings that enables a business to choose which method they want to use for discount application with regard to Deals - system date or sale order date. 

Therefore, if we are entering an order on 22 February that is to be dated in the March period, the promo would automatically apply all discounts from all deals without the need for coupons etc.

Hopefully there are other users that would vote on this for consideration.