The price of items in your inventory drives sales and determines how well your store does. Supply and demand and cost of goods both drive the retail price of your items, but changing the item price individually can take a long time. Luckily, TransActPOS offers numerous Mass Pricing options. In this week's newsletter, we are going to briefly discuss the Mass Pricing options available.

In the IC | Mass Pricing menu, there are six menu options split between two sections. The first section, Price Scheme Base, deals with generating a mass price list, reviewing the resulting price list, establishing price schemes, and setting up a price scheme matrix. All of these functions are in place to help maintain the prices in your inventory.

• Generate New is where you go to create a Mass Price List. To do this, enter the Item Selection criteria on the left side of the screen (item id, class, code, fine, sub-fine, and manufacturer) and select a Pricing Scheme (or create a new one by clicking the Price Scheme button). Once the criterion is entered, click the Generate button. Once this process is complete, the list will be available in the option below.
• Mass Price Lists allows you to view the lists created in the previous option. Highlighting a list and clicking the Review button will bring up a Mass Pricing Review screen that shows pricing information for the items on the list. Within this review screen, you can edit the new retail price, number of bin and item labels to be created, and print a listing of the items and changes. Once the necessary edits are made, clicking Save will save the changes and bring you back to the main list. On the properties tab, you can change the status of each price list to avoid confusion at a later time. Finally, highlighting a list and clicking the Update button will allow you to publish the updated pricing information to your inventory.
• Price Schemes allows you to create new pricing schemes to be used within Mass Price Lists and a Scheme Matrix. To create a new price scheme, click New. Enter an ID to be associated to this scheme and select the type of scheme. The type is what value the factors below will correlate to. You can select from five different types, including average cost, last cost, catalog cost, retail price, and MSRP. Next, enter a brief description detailing what the scheme is or is being used for. The biggest part of this comes in the listing below. Clicking Add allows you to create a Markup Detail for the scheme. Here, you will enter minimum and maximum values of the items to be affected by the entered markup factor. For example, if the minimum entered is 0.00 and the maximum is 10.00, any items in your inventory that fall between $0.00 and $10.00 will be affected by the markup. You can create multiple markups for each scheme. The markup factor is percentage based, so if 1.25 is entered, the items will be marked up by 125% of the type selected. You can also select to use rounding with the selected markup. Once all markups are entered, click OK to save the scheme.
• Scheme Matrix allows you to apply multiple matrices to a given item in your inventory. Clicking New will bring you to the Properties tab where you will enter a Matrix ID and Description for the new matrix. Below this information are five fields referring to different pricing values of an inventory item (MSRP, retail, column A-C). By clicking the button to the right of each pricing, you can apply a price scheme (created above) to the pricing value. Once the matrix is complete, click OK to save your newly created matrix. 

In IC | Inventory File, there is a field titled "CPM." This is the field where you will apply these newly created matrices. By doing so, you are making several pricing changes to a single item and no matter what happens to each value (MSRP, retail, etc.), the Scheme Matrix will keep the item up-to-date.

The second section has two options and allows for simple price edits to a select batch of inventory items.

• Mass Price Adj allows you to adjust the price of a group of items that match the selected search criteria. This screen is very similar to the "Generate New" from above, but instead of selecting a pricing scheme to apply to the items, you choose how to change the price. You can select to change the price by a fixed amount or percentage. Once the "Change Price By" has been selected, enter the appropriate value below and click Generate. Much like reporting, you can review or print the list of price adjustments to make sure the prices are what you want. If they aren't, you can make the appropriate changes and click Generate again, otherwise, clicking Update will adjust the prices accordingly.
• Mass Cost Adj allows you to adjust the cost of a group of items in a similar fashion to the Mass Price Adjust mentioned above. The process is the same, only the result is an adjustment of cost.