In this Edition:
- How to find NEW products in Product Updater
- How to make sure your discounts have been set up for every product
- Inputting your Referral Method, where should it go?
How to find NEW products in Product Updater
When you receive a product update announcement from Solatech, sometimes that announcement includes the release of a completely NEW product. We have noticed that customers sometimes have trouble finding the NEW products in Product Updater. To find them or to make sure you’re not missing any products, you first have to run Product Updater.
To run Product Updater, go to the Maintenance tab and click on Product Updates. 
Once Product Updater is open, click on “Check for Updates”.
Once the software has finished checking for updates, the Product Updater window will show UPDATED products at the top, each is already selected to download. NEW products will be found under the section labeled “All Other Products”. You must click on the “+” next to “All Other Products”, then find the Vendor for the NEW products.
Once the vendor is located, click on the “+” next to it. All of the products for that vendor will be listed. Any products you already have on your system will be grayed out, but products you do not have will be in BLACK and will not have a Current version number displayed.
To download these, you must check the box next to the product before clicking on “Download and Install”. Products will NOT be downloaded and Installed until you click the “Download and Install” button in the bottom right corner of Product Updater.
How to make sure your discounts have been set up for every product
Two words: Pricing Center! Does it sometimes seems like your products are not pricing quite right? Is the product in question possibly a New Product? When a new product is downloaded, the discounts must also be set up for that product. Solatech software provides a quick way to check all of your products at once to make sure discounts have been set up. First, go to the Maintenance tab and click on “Pricing Center”.
Once the Pricing Center opens, it takes a few moments for your products to load. Every product in your software will be listed and each will say either “Yes” or “No” under each of the columns “Vendor Discounts”, “Price Discounts”, and “Customer Discounts”. The fastest way to check if all of your products have been set up, though, is to click “Verify Pricing” on the upper right side of the Pricing Center.
Once it has finished checking all products you will see the following results, listing any product that does not have a Vendor or Price Discount set up. At this time, you’ll need to make the necessary adjustments as suggested then retest using the Pricing Center.
Inputting your Referral Method, where should it go?
There are two places to input a Referral Method, first in the customer record, then in the Quote/Sale/Order for that customer. Originally the software had a single referral method as part of the design, and in beta testing a customer suggested we needed a way to further clarify an existing referral method for a quote or sale. For this reason, the additional referral method fields were added to the Quote/Sale/Order screen on the Installation/Other tab so more details about the referral method could be entered.
For example, Referral method = Neighbor / Neighbor Name or if the sale is for a repeat customer, the extra space could be used to add that information (Original Referral Method / Repeat Customer).
Here the Referral Method is shown in the Customer Record on the Details tab:
Here it is shown in a Quote on the Installation/Other tab:
