negative markups and returning products --

We are trying to use CommitCRM to track profits on product sales by entering our purchase price in the price window then adding a $ markup to get to the total billed to the client. We can then run a report and see what the products cost us, what we billed and the total markup for all items.

The big issue is when we have a product return... the system will allow us to enter a product charge with a negative quantity (which is exactly what needs to be entered) BUT does not allow for negative markups (which is what is needed if we want to keep our reports correct). Using discount does not work properly -- as a matter of fact, if you use negative quantities and you enter anything into the discount window, it sets itself to equal the price (unable to enter correct amounts) = bug!

Bottom line is that we need to be able to add negative discounts/markups.

//ray

Hi Raymond,

Thanks for posting this.

I see what you're getting at; the system won't treat the markup the same when it's in a refund. If your markups are done by a specific system than maybe we're missing something here that the system can automate for you.
Please note that the Item Price field in RangerMSP is meant to store the list price customer pays, not the cost of the item, there's a specific field to store the cost of product items - Cost. There's also a report that shows profits (it looks at the item cost vs. the price it was sold to the customer List of Charges and Cost report

Perhaps if you find yourself in a situation where you always need to markup a price for an item so that you can keep track of the money spent on acquiring the product, while at the same time keeping track of the price you sell the product for, you can simply use the Cost field in each item to log the price you spent on acquiring the product from your vendor, while the price field is used for logging the price to be charged that you ask your customer to pay (This can be adjusted for each account/contract on a permanent/automatic basis using custom pricing). This feature would eliminate the constant need to markup all your pricing for all of your products, while also allowing you to easily manage your statistics by these values, by using the List of Charges and Cost report.

For now, we can suggest a few workarounds to achieve your current need:

• Instead of using the discount/markup feature to make the price adjustment to the charge, we suggest altering the price field by adding the markup value to the product price. This method will allow you to make a refund to your customer while returning more money than actually marked as the item price.
  
• When using a general item that has a $1 value to it; each time you need to refund a marked up item (I hope that doesn't happen too much), then you can add another charge for the general item with the number of marked up dollars in the quantity line of the charge. This will also allow you to easily follow how much money of the marked up transactions gets returned.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Doron

I will have to take some time to re-read and understand what is being said here but it seems to me that if the system would simply allow us to add negative numbers, CommitCRM would be more flexible, capable and our situation would be a non-issue.

thanks --

//ray

Hi Ray,

Thanks for your comments, as well as the feedback on the charges module in RangerMSP.
Let us know if you need anything else.

Regards,
Doron