Marking a product as "freight"
Products are typically defined using a name and price. These are then grouped into sets for reporting and management purposes using various methods such as departments or IDsets, etc. However some products have an internal "meaning" beyond their description or classification. The POS itself often needs to know that product X being sold has special meaning to the POS itself.
- Account Payments. When a charge account is paid instore, you "sell" an account payment and take payment via cash, eftpos, etc. This
ensures that account payments can be intermixed with normal sale items and correct receipts generated. Internally however, Fieldpine
needs to know to take extra actions such as altering account balances, removing account payment from value of sale sold etc.
Or, account payments can be applied using a web page or API. These also need to "know" which product is an account payment.
- Prepay Topup. Similar to account payments, if you are using Fieldpine controlled Prepay/Gift Cards, it is possible (where legal) to have the customer topup their balance. Again you "sell" a "Prepay Topup" and Fieldpine knows how to internally process it
- Freight. This has a slightly different requirement. In general Fieldpine does not need to know about freight to alter its internal operation. Knowing a product is freight however means that logic can be enabled to specially handle freight in various places. The most obvious is when we read a "document" (scan, email etc) and can determine more accurately details around freight.
GlobalKey
While you know your products by description/PLU/SKU/Pid and so forth, there are two internal identification fields as well.
- Physkey - a long random looking string that uniquely identifies a product. This value is unique for each products across all Fieldpine retailers. It is useful when product level data is shared between retailers, or when stores can create new products locally. You never change physkeys directly, and unless you are looking they are not visible.
- GlobalKey - this is a secondary value that is similar to retailer allocated physkey, the difference is these values are defined by Fieldpine. When present, they contain the same value over all Fieldpine retailers. In general you should never change globalkey values directly, and Fieldpine will automatically change a products globalkey if it decides it needs too.
The known globalkey values are
| Account Payment | KEFDLACCOUNTPAYMENTPRODUCTXXXXXX |
| Prepay Topup | KEFDLSVCTOPUPPRODUCTXXXXXXXXXXXX |
| Freight | KEFDLFREIGHTPRODUCTXXXXXXXXXXXXX |
Setting Freight
As globalkey is an internal field, there is no friendly interface to key it in. However, you can create an Excel spreadsheet and upload that to set the globalkey
| Pid | globalkey | Description |
| 8349 | KEFDLFREIGHTPRODUCTXXXXXXXXXXXXX | Freight - North Island |
| 8350 | KEFDLFREIGHTPRODUCTXXXXXXXXXXXXX | Freight - West Islands |
| 17992 | KEFDLFREIGHTPRODUCTXXXXXXXXXXXXX | One Hour Courier |
Note, it is permitted to assign the freight globalkey to multiple products, as shown. While there are no known internal limits on how may products can be marked as freight, if you have more than 100 products marked freight, you might to reconsider what you are doing. If nothing else, how will a checkout operator correctly select the correct freight to sell from so many?