Understanding Auto-Memo Behaviour

This article explains how the Cost Submission feature works with the automated Purchase Method feature - more commonly referred to as Asset-Memo, consignment or on memorandum.

Terminology

In Atelier we support two purchase methods for every SKU

• Asset: the retailer is purchasing the goods upon delivery
• Memo: also know as Goods on Consignment or Goods on Memorandum allows retailers to buy goods on a pay-as-you-sell basis

Each purchase method can have a status

• Active
• Inactive

Logic

As retailers like to keep track of distinct inventory for asset versus memo, our system always creates unique rows in the assortment for each. As only one Purchase Method can ever be active at any given time (nobody ever cuts a PO for both at the same time), our system always ensures one method is active, while the other is inactive, which should help you understand why we need the Purchase Method Status.

Some retailers expect to pay the same price for both asset and memo purchase methods, while other retailers will expect to pay a premium for the privilege of receiving goods on memorandum. The Atelier system handles both ways of working. In order to facilitate the scenario where retailers pay the same price regardless of purchase method status, we developed a feature to enable vendors to automatically replicate their asset price when a buyer working at a specifically permitted retailer requests a memo price. This feature is called Automatic Memo Pricing and can be configured uniquely for each customer.

Automatic Memo Pricing in the Context of Cost Submission

When creating a Cost Submission, vendors who have Auto-Memo pricing enabled for the customer they are submitting to, are able to benefit from automations that save them needing to replicate the Cost Submission for the memo version of their asset product. 

This can be achieved in two different ways:

1. Automatically upon customer request of memo price for an existing asset product
2. Automatically when submitting the Cost Submission for an asset product

Automatically Upon Customer Request

If a Cost Submission is already present in a submitted / approved / rejected state, then when the customer requests a memo price for an asset product, the auto-memo pricing feature will instantly create a replica of the asset Cost Submission, which will inherit an identical Approval Status.

This will look like this to the retailer: (in this example displaying an unsubmitted state)

And like this to the vendor: (in this example displaying a submitted state)

Automatically Upon Vendor Cost Submission

When a vendor is editing an existing Cost Submission, or submitting for the first time, as long as the memo sample already exists in your showroom (eg requested by the customer and quoted by the vendor), it is possible to instruct the creation/updating of Cost Submission for both the memo and the asset versions of the product: