So, we have a large list of merchandise and food items that we sell and are debating whether it would be easier to use individual products or a single, multi-SKU product for things like small/large food items or the six different flavors of olive oil we sell. On the one hand, using a single product w/multiple skus should make it easier to find the product on the POS screen, since there would be fewer tiles listed. But then it requires an extra click to pick the sub-SKU. Making them separate products makes the screen more cluttered, but only requires a single click. It’s also a bit easier to get the products in the system this way, since we can do a basic import. If we use sub-SKUs, we can only import the parent and would have to manually add the subs.
I’m swaying toward using sub-SKUs, since we have almost 200 food product variations and over 400 merchandise variations, so we would have to categorize the products more thoroughly if we put all 600 in as individual products. Any experiences out there that might help with this decision?
We have over 3000 merch and food items in our database. Sub SKUs don’t work very well or consistently - I apologize, it has been a long time and I don’t recall details - and are a pain to enter and maintain. (I’m not sure that inventory import works, for example, and I have a brain cell that says product export doesn’t export sub SKUs.) Also consider that by not doing sub SKUs your workflows are consistent - you don’t branch to do sub SKU things.
Except for certain items we don’t even try to have all of them in tiles and either bar code scan or search on SKU. (If you need to print tags I wrote a paper that you can find here on the forum.)
We keep track by Department and Supplier code. The reasons for this are mostly historical, it’s how we did it on the previous system. Make sure you put your non taxable food in a separate Department for tax purposes. Supplier codes show up in Product Export and in Inventory Sold reports, at least. If you bake your supplier code into the SKU you might be a step ahead - our old system only allowed numerical SKUs and we stayed with that.
