PARTS CUSTOMER FILES

[HALEY]

I AM ON AN ADP IN-HOUSE SYSTEM AND AM ALWAYS HAVING TO ADD MY SERVICE CUSTOMERS TO MY PARTS CUST. FILE..BUT I MUST SPECIFY PAYMENT TYPE!SO IF MR JONES BUYS A BULB FOR CASH ,HE HAS ONE CUST. NO. IF MR JONES WANTS A LAMP AND PAYS WITH A CREDIT CARD, HE MUST HAVE ANOTHER CUST-NO.!THE SERVICE DEPT USES A CASHERING FUNCTION TO ADDRESS THIS.IS ANYONE OUT THERE ON ADP USING PARTS CASHERING AND IF SO HOW IS IT WORKING FOR YOU,AND ARE THERE ANY PITFALLS? PLEASE CONTACT BUDDY FREMD AT 1-800-328-7121 .THANKS
RVF

[Gerry Laughlin]

If anybody has any good responses on this I would like to know also, a post would be appreciated(instead of via phone). We looked at turning on cashiering but the cashiers and accountant screamed bloody murder. The real pain comes in on special order prepays, telling the customer I need all of their info, they always reply that they are "in the system" and I get to respond that my computer is to darned dumb to pull their info from the service files. Maybe I am the dumb one, but I sure haven't found a way around it.

Thank you,
Gerry Laughlin

[Chuck Hartle]

Maybe I can shed some light on this. First of all, the "cashiering" function will not solve this. You could easily build several "sale types" for credit cards and turn the sale into a credit card sale using a customer number so that it accounts properly. The "Cashiering" function on the parts side puts the pressure on the cashier to "finalize" all sales. The cashiering function was created for dealerships to more effectively track open counter tickets that were more than a day old.

As for the customer number. Unfortunately, most service and parts operations were never started correctly when it came to utilizing customer numbers. The accounting department is the one who controls the customer account name for a customer. We started off, as most ADP dealerships did, with the last 8 digits of the VIN for a service customer number and a completely different control number for the parts customer. You do have the ability to use the same customer number if it is started on the service side properly. You can easily bring up a customer in the parts side and it asks the question "This customer is not a parts customer." You can take the number and go into OCUS or OMN 1 and add this customer as a parts customer with the same control number. It will automatically pull over all the customer information from service and now you can track this customer in both files. You will have to give this customer a sale type and price code on the parts side, and it will now work on the service side.

It is a bit of a hastle to do this, but well worth the effort to get it done. We used to pull a service report of new customers added to the system daily and have a clerk go into OMN 1 (now OCUS on the newer release) and automatically update the cusotmer number in parts so that we wouldn't have to do this on the fly if the customer came in for parts.

I hope it helps....

Chuck Hartle'

[rickpop]

Haley:

Chuck has seemed to cover all of the bases. One additional thought though. If I understand your post, you believed that you needed a seperate cust-no. for a cash sale to "Mr. Jones" as well a another cust-no. for a credit card sale. Chuck is correct in that you could change the cust-no. at the point of sale, in function "I", to make the accounting correct for the credit card transaction, but you would lose the customer information (that you were also concerned about) unless you re-entered the information again on the invoice.

What you also can do is, instead of changing the cust-no. in function "I", you could have your counterman change just the sale type to a "credit card" sale type. By doing this you will retain all the customer information that was there, as well as capture the "purchase history" for this customer number.

This is all assuming that when you add the parts customer you gave him a default sale type of "cash", because when adding a customer the sale type that is required in OCUS is just the default sale type, but can be changed at the point of sale.

Good Luck, Rick

[Gerry Laughlin]

Rick and Chuck,
Thanks for the heads up, I had never thought of changing the sale type, just changing the customer number to one of our standard customer numbers. Anyway I wrote a little proc that made our service customers parts customers also (21000 names, which would have been a bear by hand)which I will stick in the job stack. I don't know if all this will solve Buddy's problem, but it sure is nice to be able to do prepaid counter ticket and already have all the info there.

Thank you,
Gerry Laughlin