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You can set up an unlimited number of family codes for use within Sales Presenter and CloudCart. A family code can be seen as a subset of your entire product range (similar to a catalogue).

Typical uses of family codes could be to categorise your products by design, style, colour, size and so on.

On the product browser screen within Sales Presenter are five family code buttons (which we'll call buttons 1 to 5).

In the configuration section of your cloud account you can specify a title for each of these buttons.

In this example, we'll only use the first three buttons so we'll configure the title of these buttons as follows:

   Button 1 - Style
   Button 2 - Colour
   Button 3 - Size

In order to use family codes you must make sure you've uploaded the following data files to your cloud account:

   Family Codes - this file is used to create a list of all your family codes

   Products - this file is used to create a list of your products

There is another optional file, Product Family Codes but we'll describe this later since the majority of users won't need to use this file.

Each of these files are described below.


Family Codes file

Each family code within your system will need to have a unique code (which we'll call FamilyCode here) and a description. The description is shown in Sales Presenter or CloudCart when the user presses one of the five family code buttons.

Each line within the file would contain the entry for a single family code.

For example, when dealing with products such as shirts we may want to have family codes such as:

   LONGSL,Long Sleeve
   SHORTSL,Short Sleeve
   BLACK,Black
   WHITE,White
   RED,Red
   BLUE,Blue
   SMALL,S
   MEDIUM,M
   LARGE,L
   EXTRALARGE,XL

This file contains the family codes for two styles, four colours and four sizes.


Products file

For each product within your system you can map the following fields: FamilyCode1,  FamilyCode2, FamilyCode3, FamilyCode4 and FamilyCode5.

This allows you to categorise a product for each of the five family code buttons.

So, for a product which is a medium-sized blue long sleeve shirt, the product fields would be set up as follows:

   FamilyCode1 = LONGSL
   FamilyCode2 = BLUE
   FamilyCode3 = MEDIUM

This ensures that "Long Sleeve" will be one of the family codes that appears in the pop-up list when the user presses button 1.

"Blue" will appear when the user presses button 2.

"Medium" will appear when the user presses button 3.

If the user selects "Long Sleeve" after pressing button 1 then they will be presented with all the products that have a FamilyCode1 value of LONGSL.


Product Family Codes file

Normally, a user will only need to set up their FamilyCodes and Products files in order to use family codes.

However, there may be instances where the Products file is being created by a back-office system that doesn't have a concept of family codes. Therefore it is impossible to set the FamilyCode1, FamilyCode2, FamilyCode3, FamilyCode4 and FamilyCode5 fields in the Products file.

In this instance you can prepare a separate file which contains a list of products together with the family codes to use for those products. This is the Product Family Codes file.

To summarise, you either:

a) populate the five family code fields in the Products file and don't provide a Product Family Codes file, or

b) provide a Product Family Codes file and don't populate the family code fields in the Products file.