Delivery fees and other charges

When writing up a sale, you may want to add some line items to the sale that are charges and not physical items that need to be tracked by status.

For these items, there is the Charge item type. To add a charge to a sales order, select the down arrow next to the Add new custom order button and click Add new charge:

A dialog will show where you can enter the details of the charge. Because this is just a charge, there will not be any vendor or delivery intent option to select:

Click Save. The charge is now added to the sales order. Because this is a charge, it will not show up on the Items page as To be ordered or any other status.

You can also use the charge to apply a discount. For example, if you want a line item to display a $100 discount, you can enter the quantity as -1, the amount as 100, provide a description and click Save. There will now be a line item with a $-100 amount which reduces the sales order subtotal.

Charges as POS Items

If it is common to add a specific charge to sales orders, such as a delivery fee, you can set these charges up as a POS item to make it easier to sell the item over and over. This also allows you to track the sales totals for this specific charge.

For example, say a local delivery fee is a common charge to add to sales orders. In the main menu under the Point-of-Sale section, click POS Items. Click New Item on the top right.

First, select Charge as the type. For the UPC, you can enter a unique ID for this item, or generate a random value by clicking the blue generate link. For Description, enter your desired description. In this case we will enter "Local Delivery Zone 1". The price will be $99 at the northside location with slightly different amounts at the other locations. You could also make this a per mile charge by entering the price as 1.00 and the description could be "Local delivery per mile".

Click Save to save this item.

Now go back to the sales order, and this time, click the Add from POS option:

In the dialog that displays, we can either search by the UPC, or if the POS item was assigned a category, you can view all items for a category by clicking on the category button. In this case, we know the UPC so we will enter it. If you have a barcode scanner and a Dymo printer (see our optional hardware), you could print a barcode label for this POS item and place it on the counter by the register to allow quickly scanning the item to find it.

Click Search to find the item. Select the item from the list and click Select.

The Sales order item edit dialog is then displayed and pre-filled with all the relevant information. You can then just enter 1 as the quantity and click save. If you had set up the POS item as a per mile delivery, you can enter the number of miles in the Qty box and it will calculate the correct total.

Click Save and the item is added to the sale:

With the POS Item method, you could now run the POS Items Sold report to see how many delivery charges added to sales for the year for example, lots of good data will be available in reports!

The POS Item option is definitely recommended for common charges, as another benefit is consistency in the description of the charge, as opposed to salespeople entering different variations (like "delivery", "Local Delivery", "Delivery Fee", etc).