POS question

[Peter Barfield]

 

Hi all not sure if this is the right area for this post  however,any Help appreciated

in a design that i am working on for a small point of sale i have an issue (or challenge)
the normal price is set as a Retail Price (all good)
however I have been asked to now fulfill this next part.
A Multi-buy concept.
so e.g. a bottle of wine would normally sell for $12.99
however there is a promotion where you can get 2 for $20 ea (or a breakdown of $10 ea)
Now I have put a field in inventory table for multi buys i.e. fields 
1. a checkbox for whether it is a multi buy item.
2. a field which indicates the qty of item that is applicable as in the above example 2
3. a field which indicates the multi buy price.
4. A field which calculates the individual price as in the example above $10. (multi buy price / qty)
and just to throw a little more into it there is the possibility of a situation whereby it could be 2 OR MORE.
so I have created a field which is a further checkbox which indicates whether OR MORE is applicable or just the base qty.

I guess the question is how does one tie this into the POS where an item would usually under normal circumstances be scanned and price picked up from the inventory table 
I am just a little lost on this. I thought of a script that checks for multi buy applicable then pops the qty and price into variables which could somehow be used back at the POS screenoveriding the "usual price". Then the issue of OR MORE came into play and that is just for me draining my limited grey matter.
or am i looking at this completely wrong and is there a possible better way ie use of a related table etc.
Any Ideas would be appreciated.
I hope this makes sense.
 

[Steve Martino]

I think, if I follow correctly, the easiest might be to list the products separately in the product table.  If you are presumably entering line items on your 'invoice' (by lookup or calculation), then you can change the products in the products table without affecting previous invoices (line items) pricing.

Do you pick products from a dropdown (pop over), or barcode scan?

If a drop down (pop over), you may see

Wine-Pinot Noir-1

Wine-Pinot Noir-2+

Wine Pinot Noir 10+

Picking the right drop down would auto enter the right product and price.  When you don't want the promotion price available, you would hide those, via the relationship so they wouldn't display on the drop down (popover may be a better choice.

If you scan, scanning a specific Pinot Noir, should show all the available pricing options.  You could say to a customer, "Hey if you buy10 or more you will save...."

I think this is what you're going for.  You would control the promotions by having this as an attribute in the products table.  Then you can search on the table for promotions and via checkbox, show or hide them when scanned.

If you attach a file with some sample data, I'm sure someone will help you some more.

[Peter Barfield]

Thanks Steve,

Your thoughts and advice quickly set me on the path that I was looking for. Sometimes I forget the simple things.

Yes BArcode scanning is to be used. So with fields I had placed in the inventory table I simply run a script when the item is scanned which looks for the multi buy identifier. If found then it pops up a dialog box (I might change this to a custom layout style dialog however, it is functional yet not very aesethetic though). The user in this way (as you pointed out) is then prompted to offer the multi buy if the customer hasn't taken it up. The relevant button selected from the dialog box picks up the correct option and prices through variables and get (lastmessagechoice) these are loaded onto the POS screen at the correct prices for the option selected.

Again thanks for the idea.