@Kirsten please yes fiddle with existing order cycle.
have a look at Mark Weir’s Fennel and you will see the way i kind of propose to do the single variants from different wholesale quantities thingo…
A thought whilst I enter a gazillion variants… do I need to?
I just noticed that the FC buyer’s club can enter portion amounts when ordering through their order cycle (customers can’t do this on the main wholesale page - any idea why they are different?)
If people can order portions of a large box - why am I entering variants for individual items and smaller weights?? @Kirsten, help before I get WAY too deep into work I might not need to do …
ok, here’s my initial thoughts on your issues above (and some that have been flying in emails) prior to our discussion this afternoon 
Order cycle P/V inheritance
The issue here is that the BG is using a separate order cycle so that the timing can be set differently i.e. theirs closes before yours so that they can then sort and place order with Food Connect. Therefore the product/variant selections in FC’s order cycle are not actually set in the BG order cycle, all P/V’s available to FC are available to the BG. Hmmmm. Here’s my initial thoughts on workarounds (possible now) and fixes (bigger, later)
Workarounds: I was staring at the wall over-complicating things, and then explained the conundrum to @maikel, who said “can’t they just wait till FC has set it up and clone the OC so that it has all the same incoming products/variants” . . which I think is the right track for workaround on this. Couple of things we’ll have to think about / check to get it working (might already be ok, just not sure without some further investigation)
- permissions: who can or needs to be able to see and clone the OC, can they?
- is FC actually allowing all the sub-variants in the order cycle? or if FC just enables some, and the BG clones, can the BG then turn on/off the variants as required
Fixes (new features), two possible ways to come at this, not sure which would be best or easiest to implement
- Enable ‘Incoming’ in OC to be set to / copy from another Order Cycle (advantage in that would potentially set up for more variety of ‘chained’ / ‘inherited’ order cycles)
- Enable ‘Outgoing’ in OC to set different open / close times
Interested in thoughts on this . . I’d be very hesitant to make any moves without the input of order cycle masterminds @oeoeaio and @RohanM
Pricing settings
Hmmm, seems like pros/cons both ways. I think I’d be inclined to go with the first option as seems like less likelihood of confusion and error, especially if BG’s are managing overrides for other reasons and/or putting on additional fees (will lead to them juggling prices for a range of reasons). Also, means that you’re keeping track of / control over the variants and prices you actually offer for the bulk items. Then they only override the sub/smaller variants where you are not concerned about the prices . .
Bulk Product Edit / Cloning issues
Just a little update that Maikel has done a fix for the first cloning problem, which will mean that the producer name, the unit and unit value should all come through in the initial clone, so there should not be a conflict then with changing / saving. Will be testing in staging this afternoon and hopefully push by end of day.
He had a look and including the variants in the cloning would take quite a lot of work, so definitely wishlist rather than something we can chuck in this round.
Xero report
Just to make sure you’re aware, you do / should now have access to the first round Xero report (invoice summaries) under Reports / Xero Invoices so if you haven’t already had a crack at uploading a couple of entries into Xero would be great if you can before we talk. As long as you delete before you approve the invoices they won’t mess up your system OR you can create a fake 30-day free trial account for messing around with it
Plenty to chew on there, while I chew on my lunch. Speak soon!
Hmmm… okay, yup definitely chewing…
We can’t offer the smaller variants in our order cycle as they are not wholesale amounts. Hence why cloning would be kinda pointless, as they would get all the whole boxes, and then have to add/turn on the smaller variants and remove/turn off the large boxes. Having BG’s that have access to all of our products won’t really work, there is too much potential for confusion based on seasonality, etc. Is there a way to use distributors for this - e.g. we offer the full boxes through our shopfront, then have a second/third/fourth distributor (the buyer’s clubs who are also using OFN) which have the smaller variants available in them? Or would this cause us to get orders with small variants on them?
Also, if the BG’s order cycle is not directly related to our order cycle then how do they collate their orders? I thought that concept was that the BG gets all of their little orders, compiles into what whole boxes they can buy, then … now that i think about it… by some kind of magic… that order relates directly back to Food Connect’s cycle before it closes… I think i’m quite confused about how the two order cycles interact.
We can put them all in the same OC as you suggest (with the different BGs as outgoing distributors), which should work correctly as in you set as available incoming all the variants for the products you’re supplying that week, and then make sure the outgoing FC only has the bulk ones, and then each buying group can change their variant availability.
The problem is just the dates - that each order cycle has one open and close date, and the buying groups need to close before FC so that they can aggregate / adjust their orders to meet FC bulk amounts.
If we did it this way, you will still only see / receive the orders for FC wholesale (provided we make sure that you are not ‘managing’ the BG’s), not those for each BG’s customers
re. how the orders get to FC, the current proposal is that once BG has worked out their totals etc they place the order manually into FC order cycle. There is more discussion of options around this in that first mega-response that I did - Bulk and group buying - wishlist (section: BG places order with FC wholesale)
also just had another thought . . I think we can reduce manual finangling quite a lot if each BG maintains their overrides list with all the bulk variants (or those they don’t want) with stock set to 0, then they can just ‘select all’ from FC, whether in the same or a cloned OC, and their overrides will determine which variants actually show up in the shop. Then they don’t need to manually do it each time they copy an OC
Main thing would be just FC letting people know of new products, so that they can check and set their overrides how they want them . .
@Kirsten out of interest - how will the stock overrides work if using the ‘on-demand’ feature?
can you zero out infinity?
good question @lisahill - can you have a play with it and see? I suspect that it will override the on-demand . . but if not let me know and we’ll put it on the list of things (I’m doing a big clean-up and info sort today 
yup yup @Kirsten - although i’m struggling to simply stay logged on at the moment - just shot you an email - anything weird happening at your end? it all seems incredibly slow up here, but could be a local problem?
Just updating the release notes for v1.2 and found a note about completed fix for ‘variant overrides will also override on demand products’ (What’s New - v1.2 (150911)) so looks like this is a-ok. As is the server now as well
I’m not entirely sure, but I should be able to work it out based on the
setup of my existing coop. I’ll get back to you.
Testing the ‘clone order cycle’ system today and discovered that i can’t change over the coordinator of the order cycle once it’s cloned.
So… here’s what i did.
Step One: Created FC’s Wholesale Order Cycle. This OC only included full and half boxes amounts, as per the wholesale list for this week.
Step Two: Clone that completed OC and de-select all full and half boxes and include single or small weight variants.
At this stage I realised that the cloned OC is still associated with FC Wholesale and that I can’t edit the coordinator (can I? @Kirsten) At this stage i have put Salisbury Food Tribe (our BC testing ground) as the distributor… which made me think… what will happen if I make a ‘buyer’s club’ order cycle and then associate each buyer’s club as a distributor… does it go to their shopfront, or will it be on ours? I know it would mean all buyer’s clubs would have the same opening and closing times…
ANYWAY - i’m stuck… let’s talk 
Hmmm… so it works, in the sense that even though FC is the coordinator, the order cycle shows up on the SFT shopfront, with the correct fees & open and close times… @Kirsten let me know if you see any problem with this? I guess it means that FC keeps control of creating the order cycles which would mean that there shouldn’t be any problem with accidentally adding a product which isn’t really available…
yep, i had picked this up and gitted the other week - think is less than ideal for FC to need to manage all the OC’s. Am compiling a list of ‘critical’ vs ‘nice to have’ improvements - is it fair to say this is manageable in first instance (while only dealing with a small number of buying groups?) or you would see some kind of work on this as critical?
Currently our in-house BC and Tim’s are our only Buyer’s Club who want to utilise OFN’s BC features. We had another customer Allison, but she had concerns with the fact that customers can’t choose the weight they want to buy (e.g. enter part numbers)… I haven’t had a chance to talk to her about building variants… So at this stage, it’s not urgent for us, however it may be urgent for Tim…
After a couple of full days of JUST building variants, i’m not completely in love with the fact that Food Connect would need to build every possible variant that any buyer’s club customer may want to utilise… Mainly because we had five or so price changes this week and I had to not only change the price of the master product but calculate and enter the prices for all variants… it’s pretty time consuming!