In a dolibarr V6 install I have activated the margins module. I would expect to be able to define a buy price for a given product and the desired margin and get the final selling price, automatically, for that product.
But I am doing something wrong or this does not works that way. Can anyone tell me how I can get automatially calculated sale prices based on buy prices (not neccesary the best price but the one you select if you have several providers for that product) and the margin you want to apply to it?
Running a product-based business I can understand why auto-selling would be ideal for me but not for the customer or the demand/market. For my retail products, some items lose their value due to quality, demand and competition so auto-selling wouldn’t always work.
But at the same time, a compromise would be to have a ‘suggested selling price’ but the only problem would be, what kind of rules would we define for what type of product for dolibarr to suggest a selling price? Then on top of that, who could monitor/override that so the product doesn’t get stuck in not selling at all?
Auto-selling is not the solution as aljawaid already told. Even not useful for a product based business.
You probably will have products/services that are supplied by third parties. Suppose you register domains for your customers. Or sell items built by others. Or build items with components you get from others. You will have several suppliers (this is already implemented) with different prices and a ‘reputation’ tag. The cheaper one could not be the preferred one to buy from but, anyway, you want to have him listed.
You manage 100+ items and you have a buy price tag and a sell price tag. You select the prefered supplier, take her buying price, calculate your desired margin for ‘this’ item and set the selling price for ‘this’ item. You do this for your 100+ items and both the prefered supplier AND the desired margin can be different even if the suppliers set is the same for all items.
So a solution that offer a default margin for ALL products and applies globaly to proposals (even if you can change it in the proposal) is not enough. What’s more. When you have to update your buy prices you have to undergo the full process again remembering what margin you applied to what item and this is a mess. The ‘logical’ place to save the margin you want to apply to a given item is with the item, not with the proposal. And the ‘logical’ place to place the id of the selected supplier you want to buy from a given item, is with the item too.
So the supplier module should be ‘upgraded’ to have two more fields in the database: one for the desired margin to apply to calculate the final item price tag and one for the selected supplier id you are getting this item from. Now you can calculate the sell price from the buy price of the selected supplier and the given margin for that specific item. And when the supplier changes his/her prices you only have to go to the buy tag, select the supplier entry and update the price. nd if the new price makes you rethink about using it as your source then you can select a different supplier and the selling price will update to reflect the change. But you do not have to recall what the margin was for the item not calculate by hand the new selling price.
Do not know if I have exxplained myself clearly but in the actual implementation the products/services module is not makes short.
Thanks Merill
I’m trying to implement the same thing that you were trying to implement earlier. I’m glad you fought thru this issue and posted your final conclusions. It will save me a great deal of time. Thanks for this post.
