Our sales people are picky about the order of their line items on both quotes and sales orders. In our previous software it allowed them to move lines up/down as well as promote/demote. Child line items could even be hidden on quotes and orders. This was used to add sub-items to a line item with all the detail, but the quote is cleaner to the customer. While I can easily make the case this is not exactly best practice, it will be difficult to sell this expensive replacement and tell them they lose this capability.
A though I started:
I added a “LineNumber” UD column on the QuoteDetail table, which allows the sales people to manually enter a line number.
My proposition for line number order is easy, simply make the Quote and Order reports sort based on my UD column.
It gets deeper:
Now I theorized an even deeper thought on child line items. The previous software names child line items with a “.a”, then “.b” for the next child, etc. Now that is fine where they can manipulate sorting somehow to treat that without making line 10 next to line 1 as a normal SQL sort will treat the field as text.
I am thinking of keeping this decimal, it means my sale people will have to keep their heads on straight.
If I allow them to create lines 1 Then a line 1.1 (or even 1.01), then in the SSRS report find a way to hide any lines where the “LineNumber_c” has a decimal and only show lines that are integers. Write a complex formula to total line values for anything with LineNumber_c 1 through 1.99 and present this as the line item totals.
Pretty complex, I hope I am explaining this correctly. What do any of you big brains think?
I don’t have all the answers but I’ve thought about this before and tried some things. We liked the concept of sales kits for the parent/child relationship but hated how it transformed how the lines are processed through the system. We really wanted sales kits just for display purposes on the sales order, quote, and invoice (and maybe pack slip). We ended up replicating this “parent line / child line” feature and we called the whole thing “sales bundles”. Essentially, it establishes a parent/child relationship with lines using UD columns and we hide child lines on customer-facing report styles for orders and quotes. This isn’t that terrible.
Regarding sequencing, I don’t think you need to handle the sequencing and the child lines at the same time. I think you keep the sequence as an integer field. Add a child line grouping to the report and then your child lines will stay grouped under your parent lines. That will make summing the child lines easy. Then you just worry about sequencing the parent lines… and if you want to sequence children, you can do that also - but they will always stay with their parent line. Does that make sense?
This is great! I know I will be picking your brain more when we get closer to this, I would love feedback on how the UD column for child lines works to associate specific child lines with specific parent lines. Do you have a shared value or reference the parent line number in the UD column?
Also when it comes time for reporting I may pick your brain some more.
We use three fields, though you could probably do it with less if you wanted. We have a boolean that indicates that the line is part of a sales bundle and both parent and child get checked true. Then we have another boolean that is marked true for the parent and false for the children. Finally, we have a field that contains a unique Guid and associates which parent the child goes with. Both parent and child receive the same Guid value.