This article is aimed at stores which had previously been managing their unit inventory and floor plan interest costs in Blackpurl prior to using the new Floor Plan Management feature.
Previous processes
Prior to using the new Floor Plan Management feature stores could have used any number of methods of managing their floor plan units and recording floor plan interest costs including:
Processing order units as being ordered from the flooring company so that the A/P vendor bill in the accounting application was generated under the flooring company instead of the actual vendor the unit was ordered from
Manually expensing the floor plan interest directly in the accounting application
Manually processing unit cost adjustments directly on each individual unit each time new interest costs are incurred
How do processes change with the feature enabled?
With the new Floor Plan Management feature enabled AND its settings reviewed and properly configured to suit the needs of the store, they key differences in processes are:
Creating on order units
When creating order units, you now always use the vendor you are actually ordering the unit from.
IF the unit will be going onto a floor plan when received, flag the order unit as being a floor plan unit and indicate the flooring company.
Receiving units
When receiving ordered units, the vendor bill generated in the accounting application will be posted to the flooring company when the unit is flagged as being a floor plan unit.
If it is not flagged as being a floor plan unit, then it will be posted to the vendor the unit was ordered from.
Recording floor plan interest costs
Interest costs can now be recorded by processing flooring company statements in the Floor Plan Management tool.
Depending on how you configured the Floor Plan settings, the interest from finalized statements will either be directly expensed or will be added to the inventory valuation of the units.
In either case, the finalized statement will generate a single vendor bill in the accounting application under the flooring company for the total amount of the new interest costs. This vendor bill will contain a line item for each individual unit and its associated interest amount.
What about historical interest costs that had previously been recorded?
The new Floor Plan Management tool DOES NOT give you any ability to record historical interest costs that have previously been incurred against each unit in your inventory.
These historical interest costs have already been long since recorded in your accounting application and cannot be processed again using the new Floor Plan Management tool. Doing so would generate new accounting entries which you definitely do not want.
You may have previously recorded these historical interest costs using manual unit cost adjustments directly on each individual unit. The feature WILL NOT provide you with any ability to switch these historical costs to be recorded like new interest costs will be.
Over time units which had historical interest costs, recorded in whichever manner you had done them manually, will eventually be sold off. Meaning they would no longer be tracked by the new tool.
This new Floor Plan Management tool only processes new interest costs going forward from the time when you enabled it.