Video Transcript
In EZ Process Pro, the action of finding an available item and holding it for a customer’s sale is called reservation. The reservation process begins when the pre-defined criteria in your system are met after making a sale, and it ends when the item is delivered to the customer. We will go through the different criteria options later in this video, but for now, let’s dig into what the reservation process looks like in the system.
WHAT IS THE RESERVATION PROCESS?
Let’s say we have an item that a customer wants to buy, which we’ll call an A-100. We sell 1 A-100 to our customer, and the sale meets the criteria to start the reservation process. The system automatically begins to do so.
First, the system checks to see if the item is in inventory, and if it is available. Any items that are in a Locked location, already reserved for a customer, or damaged are considered unavailable and can’t be reserved.
In our example, we’ll say that there are 6 A-100s in inventory. Before we sold the A-100, 3 were available, which we can see in our example here. After we make the sale, the system places a reservation for the item sold, so now only two are available, and the number of items reserved increases by 1.
We had an available item in inventory, but if the customer had ordered more than was available, or if there were none available at all, the item would go to the ordering process. A Purchase Order will be created and sent to the vendor. When the vendor sends the items to your store and the items are checked into the system, the reservation would be placed on the item and proceed as normal.
There are a few important things to remember about the reservation process. Firstly, items are not taken out of inventory until they are transferred to a different location or delivered to a customer. This happens during the Shipping process, not the Ordering process. Until those actions occur, the item stays in inventory marked as reserved for a customer.
Secondly, reservations are done in a general sense. A specific item, such as item A-100 with the serial number 12345 is not tracked by the system. The system only knows that 1 A-100 needs to go to your customer, not which one will be delivered.
This also means that the system by default also doesn’t track from which location the item is reserved. For example, if you have 1 A-100 at Store A, and 1 A-100 at Store B, the system doesn’t know which one has been reserved for the customer, only that one of them needs to be delivered. It may be helpful to think of it in terms of pieces of paper. The reservation is not a piece of paper attached a specific piece of furniture or box. Instead, it is a checklist serving as a guide of what needs to be delivered to the customer and making sure that there is always enough inventory to do so. A helpful way to think of this is that reservations reserve by SKU, not by serial number.
However, it is important to know that while not tracking the location is the default, it can change based on your settings. Some companies elect to turn on a setting called “Reserve by Location”. This allows the person making the sale or collecting money to choose which location they want to reserve an item from. If you have this turned on in your system, or you are interested in how this setting works, we recommend watching our video on “Reserve by Location” to dig deeper into the process.
SETTINGS
There are specific settings you can choose to control the reservation process, all of which are in System Settings. We’ll go through these one by one. Remember, if you have Reserve by Location turned on, some of these settings will not apply or will be slightly different in how they behave.
The first setting we’ll look at affects each individual Location in your system. In system settings, we’ve opened up this example location to take a look at this setting, “Allow to reserve for delivery”. If this setting is not checked, the location is considered Locked. If the setting is checked, the location is Unlocked. Unlocked means that inventory can be reserved for customer sales.
Any location can be locked, but the feature was designed specifically with Showroom floors in mind. If a Showroom isn’t locked, an item can be reserved directly from the Showroom floor. This puts your store in the awkward position of having to tell the customer they can’t deliver the item as soon as originally promised, or delivering the showroom model that may be damaged or dirty. It also leaves a hole in your showroom floor, where customers don’t see an item they may otherwise buy and causes you to lose out on sales. To avoid these scenarios, EZ Process Pro allows you to Lock locations from showing as available inventory.
If you do want to sell the showroom model, you can always choose to transfer the item from a Locked location to an Unlocked location. You can even show on the sale that you want to sell the showroom floor model by using the Additional Details section in the sale process for the item. Additional Details show in both the ordering and delivery process so your team can ensure everything happens as planned.
The next setting we’ll look at is in System Settings, Page 1, Part IV: “Auto Reserve or Order Items When”. There are a few different options you can select here.
“Account paid to 0 or funds account for” means the auto-reserve process will go into effect only when the sale has been completely paid for or financed. There is no balance remaining on this sale.
“At Point of Sale” means that the auto-reserve process will go into effect at the point in time the sale is made. The balance remaining on the sale doesn’t matter - the item will either be reserved or ordered immediately.
“% Paid In or Funds Accounted For” is similar to Account paid to 0 or funds accounted for, except instead of requiring a balance of 0 it requires a percentage of the sale to be paid for or accounted for. Companies will frequently define this percentage to be roughly equal to the cost of the product, covering any financial liability they take on when ordering product for a sale that hasn’t been fully paid for.
“Never” means that you will walk through the reserve process manually every time.
“Auto reserve from Purchase Orders for Stock” controls whether customer sales can reserve items that have been previously ordered for spare inventory, but not received into any of your locations yet. On Purchase Orders in EZ Process Pro, there are two types of orders you can make: orders for customer sales, and orders for stock. Since these stock orders are not yet reserved for anyone, the system can place a hold on the item automatically without you having to manually reserve it. While this doesn’t place a hold on that item specifically, it does mean that you won’t double-order inventory. It also means that if the earlier PO was received and shipped by the vendor sooner, the item will be tracked by the system to be allocated for the sale more quickly.
The next setting asks, “Do you want to reserve by location?” If you have this option enabled, you will be reserving by location rather than from all inventory. As mentioned, this option will be discussed in detail in later videos.
WALKTHROUGH
Now that we’ve looked at the different options for the reservation process, let’s take a look at how the system goes through the reservation process. We’ll go through two different scenarios, 1 where the item is in inventory and the other when the item is not available in inventory. Our settings will be the same for both scenarios - the system will “Auto Reserve or Order Items When” the account is paid to 0 or funds account for. Reserve by Location is not turned on.
Let’s start with Scenario 1 - the item is in inventory. We’ll be shopping for an Artmax Loveseat.
Let’s start by looking at what our current inventory is for this item. We see that it is in stock, none are reserved, none are in an unlocked location, and nothing is damaged or otherwise unavailable. This is an item we can sell and deliver to the customer immediately.
Since our system will start the reservation process when the balance on the sale is 0, let’s pretend that our customer paid the full price in cash up front. As soon as we click the “Save Sale” button, the process will start.
Let’s look at the inventory again. Now we see that there is a reservation set - this means that the item is now saved for the customer and ready for the delivery process.
Scenario 2 will be a little different. Here, we will be purchasing the Artmax Loveseat, but this item is not available in inventory. We can see when we look at the inventory there are 2 items in inventory, but both are in a Locked location so cannot be reserved for a customer. For our example, we’ll say we want to keep these items in the Locked location and instead order a new one for the customer directly. Let’s walk through what this process looks like.
Like our first sale, we’ll pay the full amount of the sale in cash so the item will reserve as soon as we Save as Sale. This time however, when we go to look at Inventory, we see that there are no items reserved on this page. This is because we will need to order the item first.
We’ll go through the ordering process more in-depth in a later video, but for now let’s do a quick run through of how we order this item. We’ll go to Ordering, Items for PO, and search by Artmax. Here we see the item that we ordered for our example Sale 179. We’ll choose the vendor we want to order it from, confirm we want to order 1 item, and click Submit.
We get a message that the item has been added to a Purchase Order which we will need to finalize. Let’s go to Ordering, Purchase Orders, Unprinted Purchase Orders, and click Generate on the one for Artmax. We’ll fill out the Purchase Order information and click “Print” to Generate the PO. Now we have PO 82 saved in the system.
Going back to our inventory screen, we see that the numbers have changed. While the amount reserved is still zero, there is now 1 item on Order.
We’ll say that in our example, the item has been delivered to our store and we are ready to receive it into inventory. We’ll go to Ordering, Purchase Orders, and Receive all From List and choose “Artmax”. We see the item we ordered on the list so we’ll choose the location we’re checking it into, add in an invoice number, mark how many items we received, and submit. The item has now been checked into inventory and the reservation process has happened automatically. We see now when we look at inventory, that the item is In Stock and has been reserved for sale 179. If you wanted to, you could also unreserve the item from this page, which will mark it as Available inventory that can be manually reserved for another sale and a replacement item for sale 179 will go back to Items for PO to begin the process again.
SUMMARY
The reservation process is designed to streamline the workflow of all departments in your store, making sure that inventory is there when needed and placed on the to be ordered list automatically. The settings inside the system can tweak the steps to best fit your company setup and keep things running smoothly as sales are made and delivered. Reservations can be set, unset, or moved around to make sure your customers are fully satisfied with what they receive from your store and your team will be aware every step of the way.