Combos

[govindh]

Hi All,

I have a question for you ... I would like to sell combos and would like to remove the redundancy of having the combo and the individual items in the combo listed in the sales records and inventory.

At issue is that if someone purchases a sandwich (we have three varieties), a drink (50+ varieties), and a snack (50+ varieties) they get a discounted price on the whole deal.

We have three categories of combos, and right now scan each item then do a reduction on the total amount and then enter in the combo as a separate item. Is there a more efficient way to do this?

Thanks!

GJ

[daleadmin]

govindh,

What you are refurring to I call "deals".

There are never going to be deals in the program. This is because there are an endless number of possible deals and when you figure in the code needed to set up each deal and then the code for the program to recognize each programmed deal it would take more code than the program currently uses and that would make the program way more than the 640K DOS limit.

So, not going to happen.

Sorry,
Dale

[govindh]

Thanks ... First off let me say that I understand that this could be cumbersome. I really appreciate everything that you have done so far and the speedy answers to the questions.

Could there be a simple way to do it? For example ... if you allowed "deals" to be stock numbers that could then be made up of 3 other stock numbers ...

That is to say we'd enter for example stock number 9362 which is combo number one and then scan items 1, 2 and 3 (each with their own stock numbers) for inventory purposes only.

Would that be a simpler way to do it? This way the coding requirement would only be that the stock code for the deal would then allow the scanning of a user defined limit of items to be included in the deal. What do you think?

My knowledge of DOS is not significant so I cannot tell you if it would be simple or complicated to do in the way that I suggest.

Cheers,

Govindh

[daleadmin]

govindh,

OK, so this is what you want. If you sell any one of 3 different sandwiches, AND any one of 50 different drinks, AND any one of 50 different snacks then they will get either an amount or percentage off the sale. This discount will then be taken off of the amount sold of the individual items in the stock table.

So all the program has to do is to have a way for you to enter the 3 + 50 + 50 items into some sort of database along with the type and value of the discount.

Then whenever you sell an item the program has to access the database to see if the item is listed there and then check through the items previously rung into the sale to see if they can be combined with the current item to meet the condition of the the deal (1 each item from each group) if so, then it has to apply whatever discount you have entered to each item. It also has to keep track of the items in the sale that have been applied to previous deal groups so that they are not applied to future deal groups.

(For example if a sandwich, drink, and snack are combined into a deal and then you sell another drink it could not use the sandwich and snack from the previous deal to form a new deal, you would have to sell another sandwich and snack to go with the new drink.)

Plus what if you sold 3 of the same drink (rung on the same line) but 3 different sandwiches and 3 different snacks. The program would have to be able to parcel out the drinks to team up with the snacks and sandwiches to form deals.

Plus I am sure that there would be other issues that I have not thought of but would crop up when I started to write the code for this.

But that doesn't matter because I have no idea at the moment how I could possibly write all the code that would be required to do this and fit it into the program.

But let's for the moment assume that it would be possible to create your deal. The immediate response from everyone else would be, "Hey, you made a deal for govindh, it is only fair that you create the deals that I want too."

I want a deal where if you sell 4 of this you get ??% off.
I want a deal where if you sell 2 of this you get the 3rd for free.
I want a deal where if if you sell any one of these you get one of those at ?.?? off or maybe ??% off.

And it just goes on and on and on and on. There is no end to the possible ways to structure a deal.

So my policy is NO DEALS! I have to occasionally find the time to go out and smell the flowers and even thinking about deals would put the kabosh on that.

Sorry,

Dale

[brucef2112]

Ohh come on Dale. If you partner with Monty Hall, I'm sure it can be done!!

[Bruce wants what's behind door #3]

Later,
Bruce