Departments

Revised: 30Mar2015

The latest documentation can be found on the Project Wiki. The information below may be out of date.

IS4C/Fannie organizes items into departments. You'll need at least one, but putting all items in a single department isn't ideal. Separating items into departments allows better reporting options as well as data normalization (e.g., quickly see if all items in a grouping are taxed correctly).

How you organize your items likely depends on what you sell, how your staff is structured, and what reporting options you want. The purpose of this document is to explain the department options that are available so you can design a scheme that fits your organization.

IS4C/Fannie provides three levels of granularity. Super Departments contain Departments which in turn contain Sub Departments. We're going to examine the middle tier first.

Departments

Historically, departments were the first product category provided. As a result, they're key to both the front and back end. Basically every tool in IS4C/Fannie understands departments; the same is not necessarily true of other layers that were added later to meet various stores' needs. Departments are the only categorization that's mandatory.

For the most part, departments are the only categorization the front end understands. Transaction data is tagged by department. Open rings are assigned to a department. If you need to distinguish between two types of product in any and all circumstances, put them in separate departments.

Departments are created and edited by going to Item Maintenance => Manage Departments in fannie's left hand menu, then Manage departments. Options for a department include:

Name that shows up in reporting and open rings
Tax status. Besides affecting open rings, department-level tax status can provide sane defaults for new products. For example, placing water and soda in separate departments might be better than a single beverages department if your state taxes those products differently.
Foodstamp like tax, except whether an item can be purchased with foodstamps.
Discount like tax, except whether an item is included in transaction-level discounts (equity or gift card purchases are good examples of departments that should not receive any discounts).
Min and Max are soft limits for open rings. Amounts outside the range will prompt the cashier to confirm.
Margin (table departmentMargin) is used to calculate pricing (if item cost is available)
Sales Code (table departmentSalesCodes) is yet another way of grouping departments. Plug whatever you want here to roll out custom reporting.

Super Departments

Super Departments provide a categorization tier above departments. Whether you need super departments and how to arrange them depends a lot on your staff structure. They're used primarily in back end tools to help an employee narrow in on the group of departments they normally deal with. They are techncially optional; however, WFC uses them extensively and some tools may still mistakenly assume that super departments are in use. Creating a single super department containing all your departments should alleviate these kind of problems if you need a particular tool to work ASAP. For example, you might want to group a number of departments as "Grocery" or "Produce".

Super Departments are created/managed by selecting Item Maintaince => Manage Departments, then Manage Super Departments. Select "Create" from the drop down to make a new one, otherwise choose the one you want to edit and add/remove departments using the arrow buttons.

Sub Departments

Sub Departments provide a categorization tier below departments. They are also optional. For example, you could have white/wheat/rye sub departments under a general "Bread" department. Whether you wnat or need these is again dependent on your organization.

Sub Departments are created/managed by selecting Item Maintaince => Manage Departments, then Manage Sub Departments. Choose a department from the drop down, then add/remove sub departments as needed.


Change Log:
 2Sep12 Eric Lee Add notes about tables that extend departments.
                  Add H1 title, revision date, change log.
20Aug12 Andy Theuninck