Possible for more discounts than just the 2?

[Courtright]

Ronald,

I absolutely love the new (v14) discount option so that way a 10% OFF discount cannot be stacked (like in v13) to get a $300 product down to free or close to it.  However, there are only 2 correct?  Discount 1 and Discount 2.  Is it possible to add a few more in your next update?  We offer 10% off military discount as well as 20% off as our max discount.  Sometimes to close a sale our 3rd way to discount is we pay their sales tax.  But I've realized over the years when selecting "TAX FREE" this greatly skews our reports because the sale really isn't tax free, we are just paying their tax but the POS of course believes it is a tax free sale.  Instead we need more discount buttons to have a discount at the same rate as our tax rate, 6%.  I'm afraid of doing it the old way because I have had an issue in the past with an employee just hitting the button 20 times to make a product nearly free.

I believe many users would take advantage of the more discounts feature, for instance for employee discounts, paying someones tax for them to get a sale, and various percentage levels off.

Can you think of any other way to do TAX FREE without hitting the "TAX FREE" button (it skews sales reports) since I am using both discount buttons?

[rjsmeyer]

Courtright - you may well already know this, but for discounts, have you tried the price levels you can set in Product Control?  There can be up to 6 of them.  I use them for Retail, Wholesale, Local Discounts, Employee Discounts, Non-Profit pricing and Loyal Customer discounts.

These are all set per product, so you can tailor your entire inventory to vary by exactly what discount level you'd like.   Plus, you can tailor them by either dollar amount or percentage, so you can really have a lot of control.

Also, once that's set up, all that needs to be done is to set the Price Level in Customer Info.  You enter it once, and it stays there until you change it.  For people like veterans, for instance, it works great.

Also, when a customer with such a discount is brought up for a transaction, a warning pops up that the prices are being modified from standard retail, so the clerk will be aware of the discount.

AND, you get a note on the receipt that tells the customer how much money they saved, just as with other discounts.

We use those discount buttons only for one-time discounts, e.g., when a customer has been negotiating a lower price.  I haven't been able to get them to do quite what I want.

For Price Levels, it'll seem daunting at first to put values into all these fields.  You don't want to do it right in EZP - just do a product export to Excel, modify them en masse there, and then import them with the new values.

I can't speak to the sales tax aspect, since we don't have it here in Oregon.

[Courtright]

Thank you for the reply!  I think that is something I may need to look at further.  Either that or stop offering so many levels of discounting.  It's just so tough when you're trying to match online prices or competitors pricing, etc.  It's nice to have the variants.  I do love that in V14 compared to 13 you cannot combine discounts.  ie: hitting 10% off 5 times to basically make it 50% OFF.

I'll look into what you recommended and see if that would help me in what I'm looking to do.  THANK YOU!

[rjsmeyer]

I doubt that there's any way to keep employees from messing with discounts if they really want to, but I've found those Price Levels to be pretty easy because we don't need to add a step during transactions (other than adjusting that field in the Customer settings initially). 

And it's easy to monitor if you do any Sales reports (e.g., Sales Details) - you can include the parameter of Price Level to see which level is being used for which customer.  I've found it to be useful enough that I include it in my export to my accounting software for daily sales.

Some aspects took some time to figure out, so just holler if you get stuck on something with it.

[Courtright]

rjsmeyer,

What are your ideas on this thought.

I am looking to be able to offer these discounts:

6% OFF (covers tax in VA)
10% OFF (military discount)
15% OFF
20% OFF
25% OFF
30% OFF (Employee Discount)

So what if I made a Customer named TAX FREE and the discount level was 6% OFF.  So for a tax free sale they would select that customer.  Although in the future when I am actually using REAL customer accounts I think this could be conflicting in trying to select a real customer but give them a tax free discount.

I don't want to actually use the TAX FREE icon because the sale really isn't tax free, which skews my reports.  I still have to pay their tax for them.  It's really just a 6% discount.

Ideas?

EDIT:

Also, once that's set up, all that needs to be done is to set the Price Level in Customer Info.  You enter it once, and it stays there until you change it.  For people like veterans, for instance, it works great.

We use those discount buttons only for one-time discounts, e.g., when a customer has been negotiating a lower price.

So rjsmeyer, going back and looking at your post what happens if you have an actual customer saved in your database (ie: Timmy Thompson) and Timmy is a vert so you offer him a saved 10% discount you have pre-set at one of the levels.  However good ole Timmy found a competitors coupon and wants 20% off what he is buying today ... not 10% like usual.  I take it is not possible to log the sale under the actual customer in the POS "Timmy Thompson" and also use a vauge customer discount saved under customers ... like "Veteran" correct?

[rjsmeyer]

Hi Courtright (btw, I'm Bob),

The way you're looking at the discounts is just about the exact same way I'm doing it - you just need to have some kind of description for each one.  The one thing I can't address is the sales tax - we don't have any here, so I don't need to mess with anything having to do with that.

I think I follow the question about "Timmy the Vert".  First, you can only choose one Price Level per customer for each transaction.  You can ring up one thing, change the price level and then ring up a second thing, but you can't choose more than one price level per transaction.  However, you can add a discount to the Price Level you already have set for him.  Figuring the exact discount gets into some serious math (i.e., if you stack a 10% on top of the original 10%), but I'm not sure I see a way to simply change that discount from 10% to 20% for just that one transaction. I suppose that you could set the price levels in 5-10% increments and change them with each transaction, but I don't think you'd really want the employees getting too used to adjusting those price levels.

Hopefully I shed some light on some part of your questions!