Tracking items sold at too high of a discount

[Courtright]

I remember reading somewhere on the forum there was a way that the POS can let you know when an item has been overly discounted.  However, I am unsure how to do that and if you can set parameters, such as "notify me if a product is sold below 20% off".  I can see by using reports the list price, discount and sold price but if I sell 20 of that item then if only one was overly discounted but the rest were all sold at full price it is very hard to figure out that 1 of the pairs was grossly over discounted, perhaps even for less than cost.

[ronaldrwl]

There is Margin Watch in the General Settings.  This will prompt the cashier is the margin is below a percentage.

[Courtright]

So I just tried this.  I check marked it to enable it, set it at 50% to test it and exited and reopened the program to make sure it took effect.  I sold a fake product for $10 with a 55% off discount.  I went through the entire process of fully finishing the sale but got no warning.

1) If I can get this to function correctly is there actually a report to find out what items have been sold under the set margin?  That would be fantastic.  You could find out what employees are over discounting products more than others and address them about it.

2) by setting the margin warning to 20% does that mean anything over 20% off, such as a $10 items is now less than $8?  Or is it the opposite where it is 20% of the price?  So a $10 item will ring up under $2?  Thanks for clarifying.

[ronaldrwl]

It warns if the Margin% is lower.  Like 40%

[ronaldrwl]

Math Test

Price 10.00
Cost 5.00

This margin% is 100%

100 x (Price-Cost) / Cost

[rjsmeyer]

We've had the Margin Warning set up for a while - ever since I realized that we were losing money on discounting some items that we don't mark up very much.

Courtright brought up a good question, though - is there a report that can be generated to see when this warning has been bypassed?  I can find reports for discounts given and various other things, but not that.  I think it would be useful.

Thanks.

[ronaldrwl]

There is the report Sales / Discounts.  This would show what discount have been given.

[rjsmeyer]

But is there anything that might indicate the Margin Warning was over-ridden (ignored)?

[ronaldrwl]

No, there isn't.

[Courtright]

The biggest issue I am having is my employees make 5% commission on a product being sold.  So if I tell them "do what you need to do to close a sale but don't sign in for anything over 20% off" they still do and say "it's just out of habit they signed in"

It would be amazing if in the area where we can select the low-margin warning if you could click a box which would then remove any commission from the sale if over the margin watch percentage.  I have to manually print monthly sales details reports which wastes about 100 sheets of paper and takes a good hour or two going back and finding sales discounted too heavily and manually removing their commission come pay day.  I do this because it's easy to close a sale at 40% off knowing you still get commission but when we tell the salesperson anything over 20% off you do not get commission on then you'll work even harder to not go lower than 20% off so you can get the commission on the sale.

Now with the new discount feature I like how they can't combine discounts like you can when you set up a discount as a "Product". But the issue with that is I can only set up the 2 discount levels, when 4 or more would offer more flexibility.

[Courtright]

is there a report that can be generated to see when this warning has been bypassed?  I can find reports for discounts given and various other things, but not that.  I think it would be useful.

is there anything that might indicate the Margin Warning was over-ridden (ignored)?

Concerning this I just print off a STAFF > DETAIL Report.  All of my employees are give the job title of Staff instead of Cashier, etc.  From this report I can select my employee "Dylan" and track each sale over the past month and it's pretty easy to see any big discounts because each sale will list the discount given.  Then I figure out manually how much commission he would get and remove it come payday.  But the bad thing is if you do a lot of volume you'll be wasting hundreds of pieces of paper to maybe find 7 sales where they over-discounted or maybe even none at all.

[Courtright]

Sorry for 3 posts back to back but I have spent a few hours tweaking my POS system (which I love doing) and I can't help but agree with rjsmeyer that considering to put a way to track "Margin Low Warning" via a report would be fantastic.  From a retailers point of view this would basically eliminate ANY worry about employees trying to sneak large discounts to customers or even steal a product by hitting the 10% OFF (military discount) button until the $500 product is now free ... or even worse .... negative and they could get cash back!

That sale would show up in the "Low Margin Warning" Report and the salesperson would be logged in.  The report would need to show the Transaction Number, Staff/Cashier, Retail price, Discount, Net Price.

Just an idea but this is the report as a retailer I think myself and rjsmeyer is in need of to help watch out for employee theft and our profit margins.

EDIT:  Also, does the "pop-up" window show up if ANY item is under the low margin watch number?  For instance:

milk - full price
bread - full price
soda - full price
chips - full price
cookies - 60% off

The entire sale might only be 18% lower than a full price total sale since 4/5 items are full price.  So will the window pop-up warning of low margins?  Does it pop-up if ANY of the items are over the margin watch number regardless of overall final price?

[rjsmeyer]

Hi Courtright,

In my experience, the warning does pop up for an individual item.  And if you have 10 of them that are under the set margin, 10 windows will  pop up sequentially - one for each of those items.  What's a little tricky, though, is that the item in question is described only by item # in the warning window, which, of course, is not visible in the Sales Window after being rung up. 

Ronald, in the Denver Research product information on EZP, it's mentioned that, for the Low Margin Warning, that you can "Search previous sales for items falling below your margin settings".  Is there maybe some mechanism other than a report by which we could examine previous sales for this that we just haven't run into yet? 

If not, is this a report that you could create for that "custom work" fee?  I use the ones you did for me all the time, and I think it's great that you're often willing to do that.  Besides the fee making it worth (hopefully) your time, it makes us evaluate how much an extra feature is worth to us.  In this case, I'm not sure it would be worth the fee to me, but it sounds like it may well be worth it to Courtright.

Bob

   

[Courtright]

If not, is this a report that you could create for that "custom work" fee? In this case, I'm not sure it would be worth the fee to me.

Although helpful donations to the project could be appreciated 

Yeah Ronald, if you can be open to working with me to customize a few aspects of the program for my business needs I'd like to discuss that and costs please.  I think these would add overall value as well to the more retail aspect of your program.  Or even offering to trade my 16+ years of graphic design knowledge if you're ever looking to modernize the program icons or graphics.  As you can tell with nearly all of my posts, they relate to security.  How can I make sure an employee does not have the ability to take merchandise and more importantly a way to take their commission away on a sale over a certain percentage.

Speaking of low margins ... I can't simply figure out what I need to set "low margin watch" to in order to flag anything discounted over 20% off.  I tried 80, I tried 20 ... but I am only getting warnings when I greatly discount items, not the 20%+ off that I am looking for.

[rjsmeyer]

Remember, though, the Margin Warning doesn't have anything to do with discount levels - it only detects when an item is being sold for a lower margin than what you set it for.   

In my case, I sell some fairly low-margin items.  I'll buy light fixtures, for instance, from some place like Home Depot.  Since they're readily available at Home Depot for customers to compare prices, I might mark them up only 25% or so (with the intention of making that up somewhere else).  But I also have substantial discounts for employees, for instance, and could easily end up selling something like that at a loss.  So I have my Low Margin Warning set at 0% - purely to avoid selling anything for less than what I bought it for.