Price and Availability (P&A) is a feature to determine a price quote for a customer as well as the stock availability of the item. P&A uses the same pricing logic as exists for Customer Quote and Sales Order, and all information in Dynamic Inquires are accessable. So what makes P&A different from a Quote or Order? Think of P&A as a replacement of your physical notepad presently used to write down information that you quoted a customer. P&A is an electronic version of that notepad and is centrally accessible by all users. P&A offers unique features making it advantageous to incorporate into your office flow.
1) Quick Entry. This goal is to provide the user with minimal steps to determine the price and stocking information. Other than input of the customer account and the item number, there are no other "header" fields to navigate through. Additionally, you can even leave the customer account blank and only input an item number. When entering a P&A without a customer account, please recognize that the suggested pricing does NOT include any customer-specific pricing such as Price Contracts or Customer Quotes. However, list price, quantity price breaks, and group pricing are still utilized in suggesting a selling price.
2) Saved/Shared Information. Unlike Customer Quote where a customer may have several individual quotes, P&A is a singular entity (a collection of lines) for each customer account. Each time a user accesses the P&A of a customer's account, ALL previous lines input into P&A for that customer will appear. Of course, there are means to remove prior lines which are discussed later. Saved information facilitates the ability for User1 to quote a qty, price, and line note. When User2 accesses the P&A for the customer, that information is still there. This addresses the common scenario of office employees asking others "did anyone quote {customer} on {item}"? Instead, any user can simply access the singular P&A stored for the customer and see all prior price quotes and notes.
3) Quick Release. Each line entry of a P&A contains a line checkbox. While accessing the screen, user has the ability to checkmark one or more lines and perform any of the following 4 options. Doing so inserts the lines into the chosen destination document and that document automatically appears onscreen awaiting further action by the user.
a) Release to Sales Order
b) Release to Customer Quote
c) Release to Sales Order and Delete Selected Lines
d) Release to Customer Quote and Delete Selected Lines.
User may also individually delete lines from the grid by highlighting a line and pressing keyboard [DELETE]
4) The line grid contains most of the fields found in Customer Quote/Sales Order with the exception of committed qty, backorder qty, and invoice qty. These fields are not applicable to a P&A. The grid does include 4 fields not found in other document interfaces.
a) Times Priced: This is a numerical value manually incremented by the user. If the item appears on the P&A and customer calls in subsequently for this same item, the user can click the increment icon. If on a subsequent call for the same item and user sees that the item has been priced several times and Times Released is 0, you can further the conversation with the customer as to whether your prices have been too high, delivery not adequate, or possibly the customer is "shopping" you to leverage a better price from their preferred supplier.
b) Times Released: Thus is a numerical value automatically incremented each time the selected item line has been released into a Sales Order.
c) Last Edit and Last Edit User: These two fields are automatically updated to record the last user adding or editing the line item.
Both "Stock" and "Virtual" item types can be input into Price and Availability. Just as in other document entry interfaces, the item search functionality allows for creation of new items on-the-fly. No purchasing or kitting is initiated from within a P&A. Once an item line has been released to a sales order, those activities would be performed from that interface.