Products/About
Contents
Introduction
Products can be:
- physical items, such as modems, handsets, hardware and accessories
- a once off charge incurred for a service, such as an installation fee
- used to apply a one-off discount, such as a "$10 off your next bill"
- used to bill to a customer a fractional-based item, such as 1.75 hours for a site visit by an engineer.
Before setting up any products, consider if any once off fees from your supplier that will need to be passed on to the customer - such as the installation fee mentioned earlier - comes in a data feed or not. For example, AAPT regularly include once-off and recurring charges in the data files processed via Emersion. If the supplier provides these charges in the data feed, service providers has two choices in terms of billing:
- Set these items up as Products so that the customer can be charged in advance at the time of order.
- Set a price in the Product Rate Card so that the customer will be charged in arrears. This will be done automatically by the system when the charge is received in the data feed by the supplier.
Product Types
There are several different types of products to choose from, each one having its own rules on how they work.
- Physical Item
This product type is designed for tangible items that you can sell separately, or can suggestive-sell while placing an order for a subscription.
- Billable Item
This product type is for intangible items that you may offer or include as an option with an order. It could be anything you deem as billable such as an installation visit, or other kind of labour charge.
- Voucher
Vouchers are originally designed to be redeemed immediately, or later. For prepaid plans, they can be used to top-up credit for services. Vouchers can also be used in a post-paid scenario. The Voucher can be purchased by one person and used by another.
- Credit
Credit products are for creating credits rather than charges. This product type allows users to enter positive dollar values. When the credit sold to a customer, the system will automatically transform the positive values to negative to ensure integrity of the ledger journal. While it is possible to simply create a negative cardline to achieve the same objective, this method is more robust and ensures better consistency when crediting a customer.
Product Details
Clicking on the ID of a product will take the user to the main screen of the product, displaying all product details.
The product details page contains the following sub tabs.
Click on the sub tab link to learn more about these pages.
Serialised vs Non-Serialised Products
Products can be flagged as serialised in Emersion. Serialised products are designed to work with an inventory, where a product instances can be identified by it's serial number. a Product instance is simply an instance of that product. Imagine 50 Samsung TVs where the model number is the same. The identifying aspect is the serial number. Each of the 50 TVs is a product instance.
The product is made up of the brand, make, model, colour, etc. But each instance of the product has its own serial number, as seen in the inventory tab in the example below.
Non-serialised products have no inventory. For more detailed information or assistance regarding serialised products, start here.
