Easy way of updating daily costs?

[Troy]

Hi all,

Being the cheapskate i am, i'm trying to find an easy method of updating our daily cost prices from our distributor.

Our web store has been running live for a few weeks now, and yesterday we started getting orders - yippee!!

Today, a customer placed an order for a tom tom navigator, and when i went to place the order with distribution, i found that the cost price had gone up

I managed to find the product elsewhere at a cost price lower (meaning the customer still gets his product and i make some margin) but with cost pricing changing on a daily basis i need to ensure that i'm not losing out.

I've tried Mole end's software (30 day trila) and it certainly does what we need it to do, but as the web hasn't really started making a profit (yet) my MD's rather reluctant to spend another £200 or so to get this working.

Is there an easy way using excel and access to do this for the time being?

Our distributor sends the daily cost and stock levels to us via a csv file, which i then import.
My problem being there seems to be no defined field within actinic to import our true cost price, and then adjust the selling price accordingly.

I'm not an expert unfortunately with excel, so this is becomming somewhat frustrating.

Just wondered if anyone had a reliable means of achieving this?

Best regards

[Jan]

The only product we have that might do this is our Profit and Pricing tool - this costs 50 quid not £200.

But that's a by the way.

You can import prices using a flat or hierarchical import, so you could create an excel sheet that calculates the price you want based on a cost price, so the sheet would look something like this :

Col1 : Ref
Col2 : Cost Price
Col3 : Calculation based on cost price to get the sales price

then you could cut and paste your refs and suppliers price into the first two columns and the sales price would be calculated.

There is no real need to store the cost price in Actinic. If you do wish to store it though you could add a user defined variable, you would then need to generate a hierarchical import file which would be more complicated.

Final thing is that if you autogenerate your product references you will need to provide the section text in your import file, in which case should probably use a hierarchical import file, the format of this will still be simple, you'll just need to add some headers and footers to the file.

eg:

Header:Product Reference Price
Product xxx1 2000
Product xxx2 1000

Instead of

xxx1 2000
xxx2 1000

Regards,

[Troy]

Sorry Jan

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the info,

I don't know where i got the idea of £200 from then!!

I may be able to twist his arm at that price!!

Regards

[Troy]

Credit where it's due!

Just thought i'd comment on this.

I spoke with Jan this afternoon who was most helpful, and within 10 mins of me placing the order with her, my licence key was emailed to me, enabling me to rectify the problem i was having.

That's customer service for you!

Well done Jan,

Many thanks and regards

One happy chappie

[Jan]

Thanks Troy

Regards,