Model pricing plans - so ...

It seems that most CARQUEST jobbers have NOT taken the time and effort to switch form the mess that Exploris ( Nexpart by WHI ) gave us - back to the more organized J-Con concept of grouping similar customers into pools ( MODELS ) -

The Old Way that Exploris had -- meant that you would have to change EACH and EVERY customer when you wanted to adjust a price discount - hugely stupid.

Finally in v50 the J-Con way of models was finally released and our 3 stores eagerly went ahead and converted back to models - it was a bit easier for us as we only had a few months of working on v49 - so we basically coasted on any price discount change - knowing we would soon have models back. The conversion was a fair bit of time and effort and we discovered a tremendous amount of pricing exceptions by account that would then become obsolete - after a few months of asking we found that the Billing Schedule managers in the DC have the power to go into our system and DELETE these -- in our case we have hundreds of thousands of these and we knew these would be a slow down for our system - they have been gone. Good

Now --we are ready for looking at what customers go up ( or down ) based upon their buying patterns -- BUT --we are finding a problem when you change an account from one model to another - ....

The Model is 'linked' to a billing schedule ( called a pricing group in Exploris Main Account Entry and called Group plan in Sales Analysis Report - would have been way too easy to standardize names ?? ) You can NOT get a list of customers on your MODEL - but you can get a list of customers that are linked to the pricing group ( billing schedule ). So - this is basically the same thing -- fine - we can work with this. To see how this works --go to Reports>Financial>Sales Analysis --and see the box called 'group plan' ...a pull down box. Run a sample report for all in group plan #4 - to see.

So - if you want to change an account from one model to another --OK .... but ... wait two weeks and see if the account shows up in the new 'group plan-pricing group-billing schedule' report -- guess what --it doesn't ... yet another BUG in the EXLORIS ( Nexpart by WHI ) software.

We have logged this ( thanks to Greg Guyitt at Auto Barn - #1315298 9-2-10 ). But there is a work around - again thanks to Bob Miller from Walker Rd Auto who did most of the trail blazing in our part of the woods for models.

The problem is ... while the model is linked to the corresponding (billing schedule-pricing group) and when you change the model the grayed box of the billing schedule-pricing group also changes -- this change is somehow MISSED somewhere else - and that missing 'somewhere else' is what triggers the proper Sales Analysis report we talked about above. To solve this ( while we wait a couple of months to a couple of years for WHI to fix their bug in the software ) now you need to make separate steps:

1) unlink the customer from the model by EDIT and in model change to the SELECT option ( sort of a NONE option --then UpDATE and click EDIT to save changes and remove the EDIT flag from the bottom of the screen

2) click EDIT for the customer - and change the pRICING GROUp box (which is no longer grayed out - as there is no MODEL trumping this ) to the correct one -- click UpDATE and click EDIT to go back to normal to save changes

3) click EDIT and select the new MODEL you want -- save changes with UpDATE and EDIT

So you have 3 steps to get it right for future reports -- and we wait for WHI to fix yet another bug.

Jobbers that wait to use models - you like even more pain - eh? Models are such an elegant way to handle issues. IMHO