Products, and what they pay

Every distributor’s list is different, so Bottle does not come with one. Under Products, add what you sell: 19kg propane, 47kg, patio bottles, beer gas, whatever is on the vehicle.

Each one has a name the office would use, its SKU if you use one, and a price.

There is also a short code: a brief version of the name for round sheets and the vehicle load list, where a full name would not fit. For 19kg propane most people use 19. Leave it blank if you would rather see the full name everywhere.

Finding something

The list shows ten at a time, and you can ask for more. Search narrows it by name, SKU or short code, which matters once a shop catalogue has been pulled in and there are a few hundred of them.

Prices and VAT

Type prices in pounds. Bottle shows them the same way; nothing on screen is in pence.

Prices are held excluding VAT, and each product carries its own VAT rate. A new product starts at whatever rate you set under Business settings, so a distributor selling mostly heating fuel picks 5% once. Most gas is standard rated at 20%, and heating fuel for a home is 5%, so the rate belongs on the bottle rather than on the business. An invoice that guesses is one your accountant sends back.

The price on the product is your list price: what a new account pays.

Weight and room

Two more fields on a product, both optional: what one weighs full, cylinder and gas together, and the room one takes on the van in litres. A 47 is the gas; lifted, it is nearer ninety kilos and about the size of a dustbin.

Neither touches the price. They are for loading: a round adds up what is on the van and says whether the vehicle can carry it. Leave them blank and the round counts that item as nothing and says how many it could not weigh.

Gas types

A gas type is a family of cylinders that swap for one another: what the trade calls the colour. Flogas Propane, Calor Butane, patio gas, beer gas 60/40. Sizes swap freely inside one gas type, so a 13kg empty back against a 19kg full is an exchange. They never swap across two, because the gas is different and so, usually, is whoever owns the cylinder. That is why Flogas Propane and Calor Propane are two gas types even though both are propane.

Add them under Gas types at the top of Products: a name, the supplier if there is one, and the cylinder colour so it is easy to spot. Then give each size its gas type when you add or edit it. Anything that is not a cylinder, a regulator or a hose, has none.

Cylinder deposits and rent

The trade charges for the cylinder as well as what is in it: a deposit held against it and returned when it comes back, or rent charged for every day the customer keeps it.

Suppliers use different words for the deposit: some call it a cylinder charge. It is the same thing, money held against the cylinder and given back when it returns, and Bottle calls it a deposit (cylinder charge).

Both are set per gas type, not per size. Choose Add a product, then Deposit or rent, pick deposit or rent and the gas type it is for, and price it. Rent can run by the day, the week or the month. Every size of that gas type then carries it: one deposit whether they take a 19kg or a 47kg.

One size can have its own. Under Which sizes, pick Only that size and price it: butane at £40, and butane 12kg at £30, means every butane cylinder carries £40 except the 12kg. A gas type has one deposit and one rent of its own, and each size can have one more of each.

Bottle puts the deposit on an order for each cylinder of that gas type the customer is taking on top of what they already hold, and leaves it off an exchange. When they hand back more than they take, the deposit on the difference is owed back. See Stock for exactly when it is added.

Giving deposits back

Go to Settings › Business › Cylinder charges.

When cylinders come back, pick one:

• Refund automatically. Bottle adds the refund to the order the cylinders came back on. You pay it from there.
• Refund manually. Bottle adds nothing to the order. You refund the customer yourself, when it suits you.
• Never refund: it is a charge. The customer never gets it back.

Whichever you pick, the cylinders come off the customer’s count.

How much they get back

If you refund, pick one under How much do they get back?

• All of it. They get back exactly what they paid. Nothing else to set.
• All of it, less a set amount. Type how much you keep from each cylinder. Type 5.00 to keep £5 from every cylinder: a £40 deposit gives back £35.
• Part of it. Press Half, Three quarters or A quarter, or type a percentage. Press Half and a £40 deposit gives back £20.

Under your choice, Bottle lists your own deposits and what the customer gets back on each, in pounds, so you can check it before you press Save.

A charge is money rather than a thing. It is never loaded onto a van and never counted as stock.

Rates you have agreed

The trade runs on agreed rates. A pub that has taken six bottles a week for ten years is not paying what somebody who rang up this morning pays, and everybody in the office knows it without looking it up.

Set a rate against the customer and it applies to every order for them from then on. The list price stays visible next to it, so you can see what the discount actually is. Clear the rate and they go back to the list price.

Nobody has to remember a discount at the moment of taking an order, which is where discounts get forgotten.

When something stops being sold

Archive it. It disappears from new orders and stays on every order that already has it, because what you sold last March is a fact about last March.

Changing a price later

Changing a price changes what the next order costs, and nothing that has already been taken. An order records what was charged at the time, so a rise in April never rewrites March.

If you sell online

A WooCommerce or Shopify shop can put its catalogue into Bottle rather than anybody keying it in twice. Products has the button: once a shop is connected, Pull from it there, and it tells you what it added and changed. If you have not connected one yet, the same place offers to. Bottle keeps the shop’s own id against the product, so syncing again updates what is there instead of adding a second 19kg propane, and a listing that comes back out of the archive comes back here too.

Your prices stay yours. The shop’s price is used when a product first appears and is left alone after that, because the shop knows nothing about the rates you have agreed with particular customers. A sync can ask to update the price, and then it will.

If you sell the same bottle on two shops, link both listings to the one product. Bottle will not merge them by name on its own: two things that look alike are not always the same thing, and a wrong merge is worse than a duplicate.