Samples feature - similar to Sale with triggered Auto-Assemblies and Write-off instead of COGS
Samples feature (similar to Sale with triggered Auto-Assemblies and Write-off instead of COGS)
Sending free product samples is an essential part of many product businesses.
Dealing with product samples in Cin7 Core is challenging, especially if there are auto-assemblies/kitting involved. Using a sale with a 100% discount is not the way to go as it is recorded as a sale when that is not the case and will skew sales reporting and books COGS instead of the applicable samples account to which one wants to do the write-off. Using an Inventory Write-off works for simple cases, but then you are separately keeping track of the shipping of the order and if you have any kitting then you need to figure out how you are going to do that before doing the inventory write-off.
It would be fantastic if there was a specific feature that made it easier and better.
The following are some of the basic requirements for this feature. The process and forms would be similar to the CORE sale order.
1. The order is entered in a manner similar to a sale order, with header fields, including:
- Customer name, contact name, phone, email address
- Reference number
- Sales Rep/Company Contact
- Account for writing off the stock
- Location for fulfilling the order
- Order date
- Shipping address
- Shipping notes
- Required by (date)
- Carrier
- Notes
- Recipient notes
2. Order tab to specify the product(s) to be sent as samples, similar to a sale order, with fewer fields, including:
- Product
- Quantity
- Comment (optional)
- (include "Should be picked by" field for WMS)
3. When authorised, CORE would complete any auto-assemblies, as would be done for a sale order.
4. Pick tab, similar/same as the sale order Pick tab, to pick the stock to fulfill the samples order.
5. Pack tab, similar/same as the sale order Pack tab.
6. Ship tab, similar/same as the sale order Ship tab. Ship tab would be integrated with shipping apps, for example, ShipStation.
7. When the ship step is authorised, Core completes the write-off of the stock to the account specified.
8. Ability to assign additional attributes
9. Related orders tab, Manual journals tab, Attachments tab, Logs & Attributes tab, and Financials tab with the same function as with sale orders.
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3 comments
Discussing this with one of my clients who has requested this feature and would really like to see it implemented, in addition to the requirements specification above, they would love to have a way for their Sales and Marketing team members to enter the samples orders themselves. I envision this could possibly be done with a B2B Portal sort of interface, but it would create a Samples Order as opposed to a regular Sale Order.
It seems to me that a lot, if not all, of the functionality for this feature request already exist in Cin7 Core, so it is more of a question of taking the pieces that exist and putting them together in this feature.
As noted earlier, sending product samples is an essential part of many product businesses. The current state of Cin7 Core requires workarounds of using sale orders, which creates COGS and $0 revenue instead of the properly expensing the sales/marketing expense, or using an Inventory Write-off which then lacks all of the customer and fulfillment workflows and features which are necessary for sending an order to a customer.
I believe this would be a very well received new Cin7 Core feature.
As shown in the following post from 2018, how to handle samples using Cin7 Core (then DEAR) has been a challenge for a long time. The following post was solicitation of the user community as to how they are handling samples.
Post: How do you handle samples in DEAR?
A related / extended requirement for this feature required by a large CPG company is:
Some sort of website for the sample orders to be entered
For example, in many organizations, Sales and/or Marketing is sending out a lot of samples. It would be helpful to have a basic website to capture all of the necessary order (products and quantities) and shipping information (recipients name, address, phone, email) in order to send the samples. This interface would easier/lighter than the current Sale Order entry page.
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