Creating Debtor Contracts for SalesLink / Opmetrix

If your company uses SalesLink/Opmetrix to receive customer orders into Micronet, you need to think carefully about the way you categorise your debtors and assign debtor contracts. On the Debtors Contract File Update screen, there are two ways to assign debtor contracts to multiple debtors:

1. EDIT | CURRENT ASSIGNMENTS – this option allows you to assign a debtor contract to a specific debtor, to a central debtor, to a specific debtor class or to all debtors
2. EDIT | ASSIGN CONTRACT – this option allows you to assign a debtor contract to a range of customers in specific sales territories, classes, with specific discount matrixes or default prices.

For SalesLink/Opmetrix purposes, one of the main differences between these two methods is the number of pricing records created. The more pricing records that are created in Micronet, the more records that need to be downloaded to SalesLink/Opmetrix mobile devices, slowing down syncing time and costing more to download.

Reference For more information about SalesLink/Opmetrix, refer to "SalesLink Cube".

Assigning a Contract to All Debtors

An example will help to illustrate the reasons for choosing one method over the other.

Company XYZ has a debtor contract which specifies prices for 200 individual items. It wants to assign this contract to all of its debtors, and there are 300 of them.

If the company assigns the contract using option 1 above, Micronet will create a single header record and apply it to all debtors. When the SalesLink/Opmetrix salesperson creates a sales order for one of the items on the contract, the single header record is downloaded and the appropriate price is applied. This pricing record is assigned to all debtors, including those added at a later date.

However, if the company assigns the contract using option 2, Micronet will create a separate pricing record for every debtor and every item on the contract. That means 200 items x 300 debtors = 60,000 records. All of these pricing records would then need to be downloaded to the salesperson's mobile device when they created a sales order, which is costly in terms of both syncing time and download expense.

This is just one very simple example. If the company had 2000 customers and assigned the same contract to all debtors, there would be 400,000 records created.

For this reason, Micronet recommends that when you are assigning a contract to all debtors, that you always use option 1.

Note also that, using option 2, the contract would need to be reassigned to add new debtors.

Assigning a Contract to a Subset of Debtors

If you want to assign a debtor contract to a subset of your debtors, then planning becomes critical. If you are assigning a contract with a small number of items to a small number of debtors, there is not really an issue. However, if the contract contains numerous items and applies to a large number of debtors, you need to try to limit the number of pricing records created to minimise the impact on syncing speed and download cost to SalesLink/Opmetrix.

Ways to limit the number of pricing records created include:

• assigning a specific debtor class to all debtors the contract applies to
• confining the contract to all debtors for a specific warehouse or company.

In both cases, you can use option 1 above, creating a single header record.

If you need to use option 2 to apply the debtor contract, you should try to make your subset as specific as possible to minimise the number of pricing records created.

You may need to engage a Micronet Certified Installer to determine the best approach for your organisation.