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Vendor Consignment Overview

Some Rain POS system clients work with Vendors who allow them to sell goods on a special kind of consignment. It typically works like this: the store does a Vendor Purchase Order but is not required to pay it right away. Instead, they track the sale of the items and either issue checks periodically to the Vendor for goods sold, or keep the inventory for a period and issue payment for whatever sells during the period. Then they will typically return unused inventory to the Vendor.

This works very differently from the customer-based Consignment part of Rain POS, but if you do Vendor Consignment, you will be able to track inventory sales for whatever period you need to look at and you will also be able to track unsold inventory.

You are able to set inventory to be Vendor Consignment in Rain POS. You can do this either from the Edit Product panel in the Change Inventory area, or from within a Purchase Order or Receiving Order. To get started with your Vendor Consignment, you will first need to activate it.

Activate Vendor Consignment

To activate Vendor Consignment, click the Admin Button in the upper right (it displays your username) and go to Settings > Features > Vendor Consignment.

You will see the toggle for the function in the middle of the page. Toggle it On and then click Save in the upper right.

Working With Vendor Consignment Inventory

Now that the feature is active, you will see a new option under the Purchasing button on the left for Vendor Consignment. If you hover over Purchasing, click on Vendor Consignment to see all of your Vendor Consignment inventory.

• The Vendor Consignment page will display each item listed as Vendor Consignment in the system.
• You can Search the list by keywords of Product Titles, Purchase Order Numbers, or Receiving Order Numbers.
• You can also select a specific Date Range if needed.
• You can click the column headers to sort the list by that column, and click again to reverse the sort.
• You can also reference Purchase Orders and Receiving Orders involving the inventory. If you click on a PO Number or RO Number, it will open the order in a new tab of your browser.
• You can click to Export whatever Vendor Consignment items are currently displayed as a CSV spreadsheet file download.

Working with Vendor Consignment in Purchase Orders and Receiving Orders

In the Receiving Order, you can track the Invoice and Check used to pay the Vendor once the inventory sells. Please note that just like regular Consignment inventory, Vendor Consignment inventory will not display as part of the inventory you own on your Inventory Value report. It is broken out separately for you so you can keep it separate from Store inventory.

Within your Purchase Orders you can specify which line items are Vendor Consignment with a checkbox like the ones pictured below. Once the PO has been Sent, the checkmarks will turn gray and on your Receiving Orders you can still see which items are Vendor Consignment. Be sure to enter the Cost per unit, which will be the amount you will pay the Vendor as the inventory sells.

In Sent PO's and in Receiving Orders, Vendor Consignment items will show up like this:

Working with Vendor Consignment in Products

In your Product listings, you are able to see Vendor Consignment inventory by opening the product in question and in the Edit Product window, go to the Inventory tab . For your standard (non-serialized) inventory, if you are manually adding inventory, there is a check-box to set it to be Vendor Consignment if needed, as pictured below. You can also see line-item batches of inventory that is Vendor Consignment. Be sure to set the Cost per item to be what you will pay the Vendor once the consignment inventory sells. You'll be able to track this in your Sales Details or Sales by Item report by filtering by the item type Vendor Consignment or Memo, for Jewelry stores.

For Serialized Inventory, in the same area, you can specify individual serial numbers to be Vendor Consignment inventory as you add them in an almost identical way as pictured above.