In today’s video, we are discussing the basics of using Job Contracts in Prophet 21. Follow along for more in-depth videos on more advanced functions coming soon.
How to Set Up Job Contracts in Prophet 21
I have a previously created job contract pulled up here.
How to Create the Job Contracts:
- To create a Job Contract, you need to first assign a Corporate Address ID.
Now, one important distinction to remember is that the Corporate Address ID is not the same as a Customer ID. For most P21 users, they do have a one-to-one relationship. However, in some cases, you may have a customer whose parent company contains multiple companies. The companies would share the same Corporate ID but have different individual Customer IDs.
Also, if you input a Corporate ID for a company with multiple customers, it allows you to use the same contract for multiple customers and their ship-tos.
- Another requirement for creating a Job/Contract is assigning a Contract Number. Just like the Extended Description, you have to manually input the contract number.
- Prophet 21 will auto-populate a Record ID in the system once you save and create the record.
- The Start Date defaults to the date you create the record, while the End Date is something you will need to fill in separately.
- Inactive serves as a soft delete. You can also turn off this function.
- The Consignment Contract checkbox is connected to a whole different topic which we won’t cover in this video.
How to Add a New Line to Job Contracts in Prophet 21:
Next, scroll to the bottom half of the screen and select the plus symbol (+) to add a new line in the Items tab.
- Start by inputting your Item ID and hitting enter. Note that you can also use several different Units of Measure (UOM).
- The Pricing Method is the most important setting on a new line item. Setting it to Price enables the price field and allows you to enter any price value.
Another common pricing method is Source, which makes the Source and Multiplier fields interactive and grays out the Price field. As an example, if I set the source to Supplier List Price and want to offer a thirty percent discount off that price, I would adjust the multiplier to 0.7. Note: Even if you already have a price entered, selecting Source will ignore that price.
The advantage of using the source method over price is that the price is hard coded. Also, if you update your supplier list price, you will not need to update your contracts; the multiplier will automatically account for the changes.
- The Max Quantity field enables you to limit how many purchases are allowed. If you set it to zero, there’s no limit.
- Start and End Dates for individual lines are not required. Each line can have different start/end/expiration dates, but they all must fall within the window of the header’s start and end dates for coherence. They cannot go after the header’s end date or before its start date.
- The options for the Status setting are Active, Delete, and Inactive. Both Delete and Inactive prevent items from being used on contracts, although they usually function about the same.
- In the Source Location field, you can enter a Source Location ID. So if you only want this contract to be valid when purchased from a specific source location, you can enter that restriction.
- Lastly, Quantity Ordered is an informational, non-editable field so you can come into a contract at any time and see how many units of those items have been purchased by a particular customer.
A note about Items:
You must always list items individually. You cannot group items, even by discount or product groups. If you want to do groups of items, you have to go with the price library/page book scenario.
How to Use the Customer/Ship To Tab:
The last thing I want to call out on this window is the Customer/Ship To tab.
If a customer has multiple ship-to addresses, you’ll need to manually add them by clicking the plus symbol (+) and entering the individual Customer IDs and Ship To IDs. P21 will not automatically enter them for you.
In my previous job, we had Atlas create a business rule for this page. When we created the ship-to, we could simply check a box, and when we hit save, it would find any open contracts for that customer and insert those ship-to records into the job contract. It made the process a lot simpler for our team since many of our customers had hundreds of ship tos, and we needed contracts for all of them.
It is important to remember that some tabs are only enabled when you enter a Ship To ID (in the video, notice they will be grayed-out).
We will not go any deeper into which functionalities depend on the Ship To ID in this video, but if you want to go beyond the basics to more detailed information on using Prophet 21 Job Contracts or other topics, feel free to comment below.
