The Profit, Pricing and Stock Tool allows you to analyse the profit from your Actinic shop’s sales and manage the Retail price of your shop items, based upon their actual cost price. You can also monitor and update your products' stock details.

The profit from your shop can be seen for specific products and as an overall profit over a defined period of time.

The pricing pricing tools can be very useful if you want to sell the items in your shop for a fixed markup, for example of 15%. You can also set a range of products to a new price. You can also set the price of several items at the same time. This can be useful if a new item has arrived in your shop at a new cost price to you. You can easily set this price in all of the areas of your shop where it is sold.

Getting Started

Before you can start  looking at your profit you must enter the cost price of each item sold in your shop.

If your cost prices are based upon your retail price or you want to enter fixed prices for groups of products you can use the Cost Price Options. Refer to the Cost Price Options section for more details. If you have more complex pricing you can enter the individual prices of items by using the following approach.

To do this you should do the following:

1.       Click on the Import/Export Prices button.

2.       Click on Change and select the fields that you want to include in the exported (and imported) product file. Enter a file name to save your existing product details into and press the Export Prices button. When your current prices are exported a zipped (compressed) copy of the file created is saved into a folder below where the Export file is created. This file is named using the filename given and the current time and date. The archived files can be used to keep a history of your cost (and retail) prices. They can also be used to restore prices to a previous state.

3.       Click on the View button.

4.       You are then asked which program you would like to amend the CSV file with.

If you have installed a program that can edit CSV files, for example Microsoft Excel you can use the Open the file using the default program option. If you would like to use a different program, for example Notepad select the Open the file using another program option.

If you would always like to use the same program tick the Don’t show this dialog again option. This will then not ask you the question next time, and edit the file with your chosen editor.

NOTE : If you want to show this dialog again you should use the Manage assistant messages option by clicking on the top left hand corner of the main dialog.

5.       If you are using Microsoft Excel, a dialog similar to the following is shown:

6.       You should now enter the cost price of each of the items from your shop. These must be entered in the Costprice column. You should enter the prices without decimal places. For example, if you sell your items in pounds (£) and an item costs £19.23 you should enter 1923. You should remember to enter all the pence amount, for example £17.10 should be entered as 1710.

You can also amend any of the other fields that you selected to be exported. Enter 1 in the Use Stock Control column to turn on Stock Control for that particular product.. You can then enter the stock levels and re-order quantities for that produce.

7.       When complete close and save the CSV file. You will be asked to confirm that you want to overwrite the existing file.

8.       You must now import the entered cost prices back into the pricing tool. To do this copy the export filename to the Import File field. You can also enter a Log File and Error File to record any problems.

9.   Click on the Import Prices button. If there are no errors close the dialog. If there are errors view the import file and look at the product information provided for the product in error.

10.   If you are using an Actinic version before Version 9 then you now need to copy over the cost price of each item to each order. To do this click on the Update Order Prices button. You should click on the Update Order Prices button whenever new orders have been downloaded to your catalog.

NOTE : Only orders that do not have a cost price assigned will be assigned the new cost prices. This means that when items are sold from your shop the profit is calculated at the cost price assigned at the time. If your cost price changes any new orders will use the new cost price. This provides more accurate profit calculations.

11.   Once the orders have been assigned cost prices you can analyse your profit.

You can also amend an individual product’s price by double clicking on the product in the product tree. This will display the following dialog.

Viewing your shop’s profit

To view your shop’s profit select the date range in the Profit Report area. Select the date range or to select all orders untick the From and To date fields. You can then print to the default printer by pressing the Print button or to preview the information click on  the Preview button.

If you want to show all the order details that make up select the Detailed Profit by Product Report. If you only want a summary select Profit by Product Summary Report.

You can also view the total amount that you have spent on shipping. To do this select the Shipping Summary Report option (and click on, either Print or Preview).

Viewing you shop’s prices and stock information

You can print or preview a report that shows the Retail prices and cost prices.



There are also stock reports available.

 

Cost Price Options

You can enter the cost prices of your products by using a fixed percentage (based upon the sale/website price) or a fixed price.

Before selecting the cost pricing type you should select the products that you want to update the cost prices for. To do this tick a section of products or sub-section in the displayed product tree.

Using a percentage

This option is very useful if the selected products sold in your shop all have a standard mark-up price.

Select the Sale price minus option. Enter a percentage that will be used to decrease the retail price to calculate the cost price. For example, if the retail price is £56, entering 15% will calculate the cost price as £47.60.

Using a fixed price

If you buy products or groups of products for a fixed price, but sell them at different prices use this option.

Select the Set to option. Type in a value. You should enter the value in you primary Actinic currency. For example, to enter £192.42, type in 192.42.

NOTE: To enter the prices of components they must be associated with a product.

Product Price Options

You can change the product prices by a fixed percentage. This can be useful if you wnat 10% off your website for a limited time and want to quickly reduce the prices of all products (or only products in certain sections).

To do this select the required sections and/or products, select either Reduce prices by or Increase prices by and then click on Set Product Price.

Order Price Troubleshooting (Not Actinic V9 onwards)
If you want to clear some of all of your cost prices this can be done by clicking on the Clear Order Cost Prices button. This will display the following dialog:

By default today’s date will be selected, so if you update your cost prices on a daily basis you can easily correct any errors as they occur. If you want to clear all of the cost prices un-tick both the From and To dates. When you have selected the required dates click on the Reset Order Prices button.

NOTE: When the dates are selected all orders are included on that day,i.e. from 0.00 (midnight) to 23:59 and 59 seconds (1 second before midnight on the following day).