Creating Ancillary Products
- Alom Hussain (Unlicensed)
- Matt Sullivan (Unlicensed)
A brand new feature from August 2017 onwards, the Ancillary Products section appears on the quote/order page in Accelerate and can be used whenever you sell an add-on product with your contracts - for example, various types of insurance or additional safety checks required for minibus customers.
Creating Ancillary Products
You can create ancillary products from scratch in the quote/order screen - more on this below - but you can also create pre-saved templates for them by heading to Settings. First, you'll need to create an Ancillary Product Category. For our example, we'll focus on adding in safety checks. These could fall into a category of 'Safety'.
Scroll down to the bottom of your settings and you'll see three new areas:
Head into Ancillary Product Categories and press 'Add Ancillary Product Category'. Type whatever you'd like the category to be called into the 'Description' box and then save. Back in the Settings page, you should see a new table including your new category (we already have a few, our new one is 'SAFETY'!):
Next, you'll need to add your Ancillary Product Types. For example, within 'SAFETY' we might include 'Safety Checks', 'Services' and 'Equipment Replacements'. To create them, simply head to 'Ancillary Product Types' and click on 'Add Ancillary Product Type'. You should see the screen below:
Let's create the three examples above - all of them will fall under 'SAFETY', which is what we select in the 'Category' dropdown. The 'Description' field is what we use to add the names to our product types. Once you've saved them, you'll see a table similar to the Ancillary Product Categories table above:
Finally, if you find you're selling one particular product more often than others, you can create it as an Ancillary Product Template. Head to 'Ancillary Product Templates' and press 'Add Ancillary Product Template' - you'll see a screen like this:
Here's what all the fields mean:
Brand: If your company operates under multiple brands, you can decide whether or not your product template is available for all of them. In this example, maybe one of your brands deals with cars and another with LCVS; one of them might need safety checks and the other might not.
Type: Where you select which Ancillary Product Type this template belongs to.
Description: What the template is known as
Delivery Frequency: How frequently the product is delivered. You can select from a dropdown including annual, monthly, fortnightly, weekly or daily.
Delivery Period: More specification of how often the product is delivered - if the frequency is monthly and the period is 2, the product is delivered every 2 months.
Payment Frequency: How frequently the product is paid for - annual, monthly, weekly, single payment?
Payment Period: This is the same as the Delivery Period; if the frequency is weekly and the period is 3, the product is paid for every 3 weeks.
Supplier: Which company is providing this service/product.
Net Cost: How much the product is costing your company.
Net Price: How much you are charging your customers for this product.
VAT Rate: How much VAT is the product subject to - standard, reduced, outside of VAT scope or zero rated?
IPT Rate: You can select from Higher or Standard.
Once everything is filled in, hit Save and you're good to go! Here's what I've just added:
