Lack of uniformity is the kiss of death for a database. Whenever possible you'll want to use drop-down lists to make sure that you use the same naming conventions throughout your database. Creating a list of products and services helps to keep your database consistent and has the added benefit of allowing you to determine which of your products are selling the best.
Some companies struggle with developing a product list because of the nature of their work. For example, each project that a builder works on might be unique, or the sales people in an organization don't want to add hundreds of products to each new opportunity. In those cases you might consider simply adding your major profit centres as your products so that you can still determine which areas of your business are producing the most revenue.
Normally you'll want to add your products to ACT! prior to creating your first opportunity. To make the job easier you'll want to have a copy of your company's price list or have a list of its profit centres.
- Click the Tools menu and choose Define Fields.
- Click Manage product list from the List Tasks area. Alternatively you can click the Manage Product List icon that appears in the icon bar in both the Opportunity Detail and List views. The Manage Product List dialog window shown in the following figure appears:
- Click the Add button. A new line appears at the bottom of the list of products.
- Type the name of the product in the Name field.
- Type an item number in the Item Number field (optional).
- Type the cost of the product In the Cost field if you want to track gross margins (optional).
- Type the price of the product in the Price field if your prices remain fairly constant (optional).
- To add more stages to the process, click Add, and repeat steps 3-7.
- Click OK to close the Manage Product List dialog window.
Your product list will now be available on the Products tab in the Opportunity Detail view where you can add products to new or existing opportunities. The products will be arranged alphabetically by product name.
Adding products to your ACT! database has an additional advantage for the math-challenged readers in the crowd. When you select products to include in an opportunity, ACT! will allow you to add a quantity. This quantity will be multiplied by the pricing of the product to create a line item total. And, if you add several products to an opportunity all the product lines will automatically add together to create a total amount for the opportunity.
There are two occasions in which ACT! users are hesitant to add specific pricing to their products. Sometimes there is a huge variance in the pricing. For example, a cabinet maker might sell cabinets that have a huge range in pricing. In this scenario you might consider leaving the price amount blank and filling in the correct price for each new opportunity.
In other situations your pricing might vary according to the circumstance. For example, you might want to extend a 25% discount to your best clients, or the pricing may vary based on a number of other variables. In those situations you might want to set a default price knowing that you can adjust it accordingly on an as needed basis each time you create a new opportunity.
Some companies have a very large list of products and adding them all manually might prove to be extremely time consuming. Thankfully ACT! will allow you to import a list of your current products by following these steps:
- Create an import file in
.csvor.txtformat for your existing products. The file must contain these column headers in exactly this order: Name, Item Number, Cost, and Price. - Make sure that data appears in all rows of your import file. If you don't use item numbers consider placing an X in that row and if you don't track cost use a 0.
- Click the Import button on the Manage Product List dialog window. The Import Products dialog box will open like the one in the following figure:
- Click the Browse button to navigate to the import file and make sure that a checkmark appears in the Source file has column headers field.