Do you sell any custom products that you don’t stock? Maybe blinds from Hunter Douglas, wallpaper from Thibaut, or flooring from Shaw?
You can now more easily track your costs and margins on these sales!
Problem: Tracking the cost on special orders
Whenever you do a sale in Rundoo, the cost associated with each product sold is the average cost of your inventory of that product. This is called the average cost method, and we wrote about it in-depth in a previous Primer.
But what if you don’t keep the product in inventory? For example, a customer wants some wallpaper, you order on their behalf, and you sell it to them.
To ensure the average cost was correct, you would have to make a new product, receive it from 0 to 1 when it arrived, and then sell it from 1 back to 0.
What an error prone process! 😣
Solution: Special order products
What if you could just edit the cost directly on the sale? You sell the wallpaper to the customer, input the cost, and voila—your margin is correct.
Well, now you can 😊
How to do special orders
If you prefer video overviews, Max made one!
Step 1: Toggle the product as “special orderable”
We’ve seen clients set up their special order products in one of two ways:
One generic product. Use one product for all special orders. All details live as notes on the sale (see step 2).
Multiple specific products. Use different products for different vendors, dye lots, books, models, etc. For example, you may have one product for each wallpaper book. This is more work to maintain but allows you to analyze trends more easily.
In the picture below, we use the second approach and have a product for our first Brewster wallpaper book.
Step 2: Add notes to the product in a sale
Now, add the product to a sale, and Rundoo will ask for additional details. Input the pattern, dimensions, vendor, or anything else.
Rundoo’s powerful search can retrieve these notes any time.
Step 3: Edit the cost
Simply edit the cost! It’s that easy.
Step 4: Edit any time
But wait! What if you need to change the cost afterward? What if you need to add more details? Edit the notes and cost any time.
What next?
We aim to continue making Rundoo better for special orders. We’re exploring vendor integrations (eg, with Hunter Douglas’s SmartDirect), auto-saving the associated order, and accepting deposits.
👋