Supplementary sales items in AX 2012 R3

Supplementary sales items in AX 2012 R3

In a sales workshop the other day the Subject matter expert said “Buy 25 and get a free beanie”. (For those of you not familiar with New Zealand, a beanie is a knitted cap that’ll keep your head toastie-warm).

The obvious solution to this “Buy one get one free” scenario is Supplementary sales items. Let’s not linger too long on the acronym BOGOF, and set some up. Probably easiest to start from the item master (Released products) form. You setup Supplementary sales items per item or group of items, so let’s start by assigning an item to our ‘Supplementary item group’:

Then click on the ‘Supplementary sales items’ button on the Sell action tab. The system opens the Supplementary items form:

I’ll choose the Item code ‘Group’ and click New, and then select whether this supplementary item applies to a specific customer (Table), or a group of customers, or all customers:

The fields on this form are pretty self-explanatory. You’re defining a quantity that the customer has to order before this supplementary item applies. You’re setting the quantity for the supplementary item; from/to dates; and whether the item’s Free of charge. If the item is not a Free of charge item then you are using this form to support up-selling (for instance a supplementary item could be an optional accessory or spare part).

Incidentally, the Account code group here refers to the Customer’s Supplementary item group:

Create a sales order for the customer and enter a sales order line for one of the items in the supplementary item group, then click Sales order line > Calculate > Supplementary items. The system displays the Calculated supplementary items form, split according to whether the supplementary items are mandatory or optional:

Click ‘Include’ on the optional items you want to add to the sales order (the mandatory items are already selected to include) and click OK.

The system adds a new sales order line for you:

I’m trying to give up customisations – but that’s harder than giving up smoking, and there a couple of features about this function that I’d like to tidy up. There’s no indication to the user that there are supplementary items setup – and perhaps the Calculated supplementary items form ought to pop-up automatically when the user confirms the sales order. Also, although you setup the supplementary items per supplementary item group, the calculation applies to each sales order line independently rather than the sales order as a whole. Finally, the Free of charge flag sets the sales price to zero – maybe a 100% discount is a better option. But with those customisation in place the whole process is “sweet as”.

And since you’re still with me, go to https://community.dynamics.com/ax/b/guyterrysaxblog/archive/2015/07/15/automatically-cancel-or-delete-sales-order-lines-for-supplementary-items

Guy’s found a new option in the latest version of AX 2012 which will cancel or delete the supplementary items, if the main item is cancelled or deleted.

He’s also done a superb job of documenting how to achieve the same result using the more sophisticated pricing options that are available in the Retail module: https://guyterry.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/retail-pricing-on-standard-ax-sales-order/