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CMS Customer and Pricing Management

Benefits

This module provides a central database to establish customer records, as well as standard and customer specific pricing in support of Order Processing, Accounts Receivable, G/L, and Sales Analysis functions. Once defined, CMS will automatically maintain certain information about that customer, including: total value of open orders, open A/R amount, last customer activity date, last invoice date, last payment date, high A/R balance and credit status information.

Features

The Customer and Pricing Management Module enables you to create and manage Customer Master File records and sophisticated customer-specific pricing and rules. Other CMS modules access the customer master record in order to extract information about a particular customer or to validate that a customer is actually recorded in the file. User-defined fields are provided along with Text Management to allow free text for memos or comments to be recorded.

Some examples of information the Customer and pricing Management Module allows you to define are:

General Ledger Defaults A multi-level defaulting structure exists for determining the general ledger accounts that are posted for a particular sales order or A/R transaction. This structure allows you to indicate any or all G/L accounts to post as "customer specific" by referencing those accounts in the Customer Master File record. If the accounts are not set forth in the Customer Master File record, the system looks elsewhere for the accounts to post.

Customer Hierarchical Structures The customer master record includes information that associates certain customers for the purposes of Sales Analysis Bookings Records, Accounts Receivable Activity, and Automatic Credit Checking at Sales Order Entry.

Sales Analysis Sales activity for customers is recorded automatically into the CMS Sales Analysis module. You can combine the sales analysis postings for a number of customers under a single "Account Customer" using the account cross-reference in the customer master record.

Accounts Receivable Activity CMS recognizes that many of your customers may actually be divisions of another customer. If this "higher level" customer is responsible for paying the bills of its subsidiaries, you can indicate this relationship using the bill-to cross-reference field on the master record of each subsidiary.

Automatic Credit Checking The CMS sales order entry programs allow you to perform automatic credit checking on customers whenever you save a sales order document. Automatic credit checking is performed in two ways: Credit Limit Check and Credit Number of Days Check.

Selling Prices Line item unit prices and discounts are managed in the Customer and Pricing Management Module. Both Standard pricing and Special pricing features are provided.

Standard Pricing You can establish up to 24 standard prices for each inventory part. Sixteen of the price codes, identified by the letters A through P, can be fixed. The other eight price codes, identified by the numbers 1 through 8, express the price as a percentage and cause the price to vary automatically with changes in the standard cost. The price code "Q" will force the price to be manually input by the sales order taker rather than be automatically derived by the system. The price code "0" (zero) will cause the price to be set to the current standard cost for the item sold. The price code indicated in the master file record for each customer determines the normal price that customer is to be charged for items that he purchases.

Special Pricing You can establish special prices or pricing rules to override or supplement the standard pricing for a particular sale. Special pricing can be assigned by single customer or by customer type, for a specific part or an entire category of parts. Special pricing can be date effective. The special prices can be applied to as many as ten levels of transaction volumes, and by their own stocked units of measure. For each quantity bracket, the special price amount can be calculated by allowing a user-defined discount on top of the customer's standard price. Special prices can also be calculated using an exception price code or a flat price amount, and, if a discount percent is also specified, it will be applied to these prices to arrive at the special price.

Pricing vs. Stocking Unit of Measure Prices are set for the pricing unit of measure which may or may not be the same as the stocking unit of measure. This is helpful in cases, for example, where inventory is stocked by the foot and priced to customers by the inch. The stocking unit of measure, the pricing unit of measure and the conversion factor between the two is set in the Part Master File record for each inventory item.

Precious Metal Surcharges You can establish whether certain items in your product prices fluctuate with the commodities market, i.e. Gold. These types of items require that a surcharge be required based on the current market value of that item. Once defined, these are automatically calculated at the time of order entry.

Some of the information that you maintain in the Customer & Pricing Management module is listed below:

• Ship-To/Sold-To/Bill-To addresses
• Various codes to classify customers
• Various defaults for tax, selling, pricing, and credit information
• Customer cross references to link different customer codes
• Salesmen codes and sales tax codes
• Customer type codes and sales region codes
• Payment terms codes and finance charge tables
• Shipping Region codes
• Standard and Special pricing, quantity discounts, and price effectivity
• AUtomatic pricing based on item, quantity, customer, and 'seasonal price'
• Customer credit and history tracking
• NSF recording and credit hold management

Major On-Line Functions

• Customer Types
• Customer Balances
• Manufacturer Codes
• Customer / Manufacturer / Part Cross Reference File
• Industry (SIC) Codes
• Credit
• Standard Selling Prices
• Special Prices
• Price Codes
• International Prices
• Precious Metals Pricing & Surcharges

Major Reports

• Customer Detail
• Selling Prices
• Price Books
• Credit
• Account Status
• Sales Taxes
• Sales Commissions

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