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Adding Accessories for Items
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Written by Ashok P
Updated over 4 months ago

Accessories are Products or Labor Items that are associated with another Product or Labor Item in your Catalog. Accessories help you not forget to add Product or Labor Items associated with the "parent" item.

Accessories can be added to multiple Items at a time within the Product Explorer and Labor Explorer interfaces, as well as within the Project Editor.

Product Explorer

To add accessories, select the items that you wish to accessorize and from the Tools tab click Accessories and then choose Selected or All.

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This will open the Update Accessories form.

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There are two options when adding Accessories in bulk.

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Here you can click the Add Product or Add Labor buttons to add accessories to the selected Items. You can also Paste any Items that you have previously copied.

When Accessories are added, the Prompt and Recommend options are prechecked.

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The following are the options related to accessories.

Option

Description

Quantity

The number of accessory items for the parent item.

Prompt

This setting will trigger a prompt window for the accessory when the "parent" Product is added to a Project/Service Order.

If you uncheck this box, the accessory will automatically be added to the Project/Service Order when the "parent" Product is added.

Recommend

This setting will pre-select the accessory in the prompt window within a Project/Service Order.

Unchecking this box will require you to check the box within the prompt window if you wish to add the accessory to the Project.

This is useful for accessories that are optional or only needed occasionally.

Non-Billable

Checking this option will zero out the Unit Price of the Product within the Project file, but not the Unit Cost. It also zeroes out any labor being charged for the Product, but not the cost of the Labor.

Any labor hours associated with the Product are maintained. This option is useful for Products that you are providing but not charging your client for. Because these items retain their cost values, they do factor into your overall project margin/profit.

Example: A Product has the following: Unit Cost = $50 and Unit Price = $100. It has one hour of labor with a cost of $75/hour and a price of $150/hour. You add this to a project and it is marked as Non-Billable. Nothing will be charged to your client but the Project will incur a cost of $125 ($50 from the Product + $75 from the Labor associated with the Product) and this cost will affect the Project's margin/profit. If you do not want to incur a cost for the Product you can manually zero this field out within the Project. If you do not want to incur a cost for the labor you can zero out the hours for the Product within the Project.

Do Not Order

Checking this option will filter out the products when creating Purchase Orders.

Checking/unchecking this option here will not affect this setting for the non-accessory instance of the Product in the Catalog.

Example 1: Product B has "Do Not Order" checked and it is added to Product A as an Accessory. The "Do Not Order" option will be checked on the Accessories form/tab. If you then uncheck this option on the Accessory form/tab, it will not uncheck this option on Product B in your Catalog, it will just be unchecked for that instance of Product B as an Accessory.

Example 2: Product B has "Do Not Order" checked and it is added to Product A as an Accessory. The "Do Not Order" option will be checked on the Accessories form/tab. If you then open Product B in your Catalog and uncheck this option, it will still be checked for instance that is an Accessory to Product A.

Included

Checking this option will zero out the Unit Cost and Unit Price for the accessory.

If charging for labor using Labor Types and Labor Hours, the labor will still be charged for the Product. This is the same functionality as the Owner Furnished Equipment setting for Products.

This option for Accessories is intended for Products like a remote control that is included with some equipment, but you also sell it individually so don't want to mark the remote control as "Owner Furnished Equipment" in your Catalog but want it to have no pricing when it is an Accessory to another Product.

There is a Project Setting regarding the "Included" option as to whether to automatically mark items as "Do Not Order" when they are marked as "Included."

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You can use the Update button to change the Prompt and Recommend settings for multiple Items at a time:

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Project Editor

Within the Project Editor, you have access to this function via the Update button on the Tools tab.

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Adding Accessories to items within a Project does not automatically update (by default) your Catalog. You can use the Update to Catalog feature if you wish to modify your Catalog.

Accessories Tab

You can also add accessories to individual Products or Labor Items via the Accessories tab when editing individual Products or Labor Items in their Explorers.

You can also do this within the Project Editor.

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Reporting

On the Accessories tab for an item, there is a "Summarize in Client Reports" option.

When this is checked, the accessories will not display on Proposal reports.

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The "parent" Item's price will have an asterisk next to it indicating that the price includes accessories.

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When the "Summarize in Client Reports" option is unchecked, the accessories will display beneath the "parent" product.

By default, pricing for the accessories will not display on the Proposal report. However, this can be changed.

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The Report Definitions for Proposal reports have a few options relating to Accessories.

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Summarize Accessories? - the default is "Item" which means that the report will treat each Item with Accessories based on the "Summarize in Client Reports" option. You can override this setting whenever you want by choosing "All" or "None."

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Show detail pricing? - will display the price of Accessories when choosing to show Accessories on the report.

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Notice that in the image above the "parent" item still shows the price including Accessories. There is another Report Parameter you can change to have the "parent" item just display its price. However, if you use this option you must choose to not summarize any Accessories and you must choose the "Show detail pricing?" Parameter described above.

If you do not do both of these things, your pricing on your Proposal will be wrong, i.e. the prices of Accessories will not be included in the report.

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There is also a Report Setting named "Keep accessories with parent." The default is "True" and setting this to "False" will not list the Accessories beneath the "parent" Item.

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