We have a surprise announcement today where we are publishing an update to the discount system. Updating the discounts system has been on our development list for quite a while and our team had some spare time during this cycle to crank out some additional changes. Starting today, Ricochet has a new discount system with some pretty massive improvements.
Discounts Can Now Be Automatically Applied To Your Items At The POS
If you navigate to Preferences>Product>Discounts, you will see a brand new layout. The way it works is simple.
First, create a new discount and give it a name (ie: Holiday Sale).
Naming the discount helps your team understand why something is discounted. Note that the sales are not time-bound. Instead, they are toggled on or off. This makes it easy to reuse a sale if it is something you regularly apply, such as a First Thursday sale. Web store users can also toggle the sale on or off for their online store.
Second, choose the number format for the sale. This can be either a percentage or a fixed dollar amount.
For consignment operations, choose the absorbing type. For retail, select “Store.”
Then you can choose what products are impacted by this sale. Choose between category, consignor, in-store location, or all products. Once you select the type of discount, you can choose what the parameter is.
There are tons of new possibilities with this new system. Here are a few examples:
- Vendor-based stores can create vendor-specific discounts.
- Automatically apply discounts to clearance rack inventory.
- Quickly turn on and off storewide, holiday, or seasonal sales.
- Control which sales are active for your online store.
Individual Item And Transaction Discounts Are Still Around
You can continue to apply discounts to products or entire transactions at the POS. The process remains the same. Selecting between a percentage or fixed amount, you can discount items as you see fit.
How To Handle Items With Multiple Active Discounts
In order to prevent discounts unexpectedly stacking, we have decided to only allow one discount per item. The system will automatically default to the most recently applied discount. For example, if you have had backpacks on sale 20% off all summer, and then decide to do a storewide Back-To-School sale for 25% off all items, backpacks will be 25% off instead of 45%.
If this happens and you would like to stack the sales together, you can cancel the discount at the POS and then manually apply a new discount to the item, just like you normally would prior to this update.
We’ve also updated reporting for gift cards.
This is a passive update to stage the reporting for the coming release of native gift card support.
All redeemed gift card tenders will now reflect that as a cost instead of net.
Previously, all tender types were reported as a positive net income. If you had been using a third-party gift card service in the past, you were probably aware that the gift card redemption should be a net loss. This is because when the gift card was originally purchased, it artificially reports income that is then realized once the card is spent. To compensate for this, stores using gift cards would have to manually change their income reports in QuickBooks are whatever accounting software you are using.
We know this can be confusing for some people. If you have any questions or want a further explanation, please reach out to us.
With that said, we are in the final stages of testing for native gift cards. This update is intended to go live before September. A thorough blog post and details on how to sign up, what cards to use, and how it all works will go live in the coming weeks.
As usual, follow us on Facebook for the most up-to-date information. We typically post there first.
