Think of Goods and Services as a configurable set of price lists, of which you can create as many as you wish. Each price list is based on a Goods and Service Item Type. Items of the following types can be created.
| NAME | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| Purchase Items | Enable the maintenance of pre-approved price information for goods or services that you will purchase. Items of this type can be used as reference data for Purchases. For example, you may specify a price list for Expert Reports from specific suppliers. |
| Fixed Fee Elements | Enable the creation of fixed fees that you may charge clients. Fees are optionally referenced by the configuration of your fee templates. |
| Rate Cards | Define the chargeable costs for your services time by a time unit of measure e.g. hours |
| Internal Cost Rates | Define the internal costs for your services time by a time unit of measure e.g. hours |
To create a new price list you first open the Goods and Services feature. Within the feature, you will see the configured item types.
Whilst this list is often sufficient, you are free to create additional price lists by clicking on the “Add Item Type” button. This facility is frequently used in cases where:
- You require price lists for different currencies
- You require highly specialised price lists for large clients
MANAGING YOUR GOODS AND SERVICES ITEMS
Once enabled, Goods and Services items can be managed in the Finance Admin area of the application.
For a given goods and services item, you specify the:
- Items coding structure – name, description, and code
- Matching rules – these determine what circumstances an item is made visible to your users. For example, you can specify that only certain fixed fee items are made available for certain work types.
- The unit of measure – see next section
- The price or cost of the item – this can also be striped by client/supplier and jurisdiction.
Since there can often be many Goods and Services items present in your system a bulk loader exists for these items. Within the Excel Upload feature you will see a configured example of this.
UNITS OF MEASURE
Goods and Services items are bought or sold in units. The units available in the solution are configured under Unit of Measure types.
Within the Feature Framework, there is a Global Feature for the definition of your units of measure types. This provides common types such as Quantity and Time as standard, but you are free to extend these as you wish.
Once configured the individual units of measure can then be configured within the Finance Admin area of the application and then referenced by Goods and Services Item types.