Order Guides

Overview

What are Order Guides?

Order Guides (also sometimes referred to as Vendor Catalogs, Bid Sheets, Pricing Sheets, etc...) allow you to have a list of items from your vendors that you can choose to link to your Craftable items and purchase units. The Order Guide will update the pricing you see on Craftable against the linked purchase units and on your Order Form page, giving your team the ability to use Craftable knowing that the prices they're seeing are as up to date as possible, even if you haven't ordered from the vendor recently - your pricing will be as up to date as the most recently provided Order Guide data.

How do I get Order Guides?

Craftable supports two types of Order Guides - either ones that the vendor provides via an EDI connection, or a manual import of a file that either you can import or your vendor can. To have Order Guides activated for your Craftable Account you must have Vendor Catalogs, eProcurement, and Electronic Invoicing as part of your subscription.

Setup

See below for details about the different types of order guides, including information about uploading your own. Once you have order guides on your account you will need to map the items on the order guide to the items in your system. 

Types of Order Guides

EDI Order Guides

EDI Order Guides are available with specific vendors who offer the integration. Order guides must be configured by the Craftable Integrations Team for you. Once this integration is complete, you will see an order guide option available under the Orders section of your navigation bar. (This will be at Director if you have a Director level inventory, or at the store level if you manage your items locally.)

Manual Order Guides

Even if none of your vendors offer EDI Order Guides Craftable supports Manual Order Guides, which can be imported either from your end, or you can subscribe to a manual order guide that your vendor manages through their vendor portal. For details about uploading a manual order guide for your vendors, feel free to send them through this article, which explains the process through the Vendor portal.

If your vendor is going to manage the Order Guide click the +Subscribe button on the Order Guides page, select the relevant vendor and enter the Share Code the vendor must provide you.

If you plan to manage your own manual Order Guide you can get started by clicking the Import button at the top right. To download the template click the "click here" link at the top of the popup. This will download an excel file to your computer, fill out the spreadsheet (there's a tab with Instructions if you're confused at all). Be sure to Save the file, and then return to this popup and import it!

For Item Matching Strategy generally you want to select "SKU Only", unless your order guide file reuses the same SKU for Case and Each, in which case you should select "SKU and Unit of Measure".

How to Map your Order Guide

Linking Order Guide Items

Click on an Order Guide to view it. The system will auto match your existing items to the items on the order guide based on a combination of factors for each vendor. Typically SKU + Unit of Measure, but varies depending on each vendors specifications.

On the order guide, you'll see a link icon to the left of each item on the order guide. Links that are Green are already linked to existing items in your system, but links that are Red are not linked. This means that your users will not be able to order or receive those items until you link them to an item on the system.

To map your unlinked items click the name at the left, search for an existing item if you know this item already exists, or select to create a new item. If you do not want your team to order an item on the order guide, do not map it. Once you've completed any missing mappings, if you manage your inventory at Director, be sure to do a store sync to push the updates down to your stores. 

Mapping to Existing Items

If your items and purchase units already exist on the system you can link the order guide lines to them by clicking on an unlinked item in the list, typing in part of the item name as you've named it on Craftable, and selecting the item from the dropdown.

In the next screen the system will ask you a question that is formatted as:

"How many [of this item's Count Unit] are in this Pack Size of [the vendor's Pack Size]?"

The value in the quantity field (48 in the image below) defaults to the Pack that your vendor entered on the Order Guide file, but you can change this as needed to properly reflect the size of the pack in relation to your count unit. The count unit (1avocado in the image below) is coming from the count unit of the item you selected.

Once you've entered the correct pack size the system will suggest a purchase unit if you have one in existence. In the example above we have the 48 count case purchase unit, so would click the check box at the left and then click "Map" at the bottom right to save. Watch the video below for more.

Creating New Items while Mapping

If the line you are mapping on the order guide belongs to an item that does not yet exist you will need to create it as a new item, which you can do through the mapping screen. Just click the line to open the mapping screen, and type the name of the item into the Name field. When what you've typed does not match any existing items on the platform you'll receive an option to add a new item to the system. Just click the "Click Here" to start the process.

The screen will default with the data that the vendor has provided. You can see in the image below where each of these fields are being pulled from. That being said, you can edit any of these fields as needed to correctly correspond with how you want to name your item, count your item, and call the purchase unit.

See below for a step by step video walkthrough:

What happens now that the Order Guide is linked?

This means that when your vendor releases a new order guide with updated pricing, this new price will automatically update the price of the linked purchase unit. This ensures that if you're ordering on the system you have the most up to date price on your order, or if you're doing manual invoices that the most recent price is available.

So what does this change?

For the users who are placing and receiving orders this does not change any step in their process, they won't even see a change. They will still place orders either on the Order Form or by creating an order and adding items to it. 

How do I get Order Guides?

Order guides are only available for users with electronic invoicing as part of their package, and only specific vendors are able to be setup for EDI Order Guides. To check if any of your vendors are available please contact the support team at support@craftable.com or your account manager to check!