• labour, postage, packing or carriage.
• maintenance, repairs and other services.
• products for which no permanent record is kept of physical stock levels, for example items sold as part of a special promotion or ordered on a one-off basis.

Services are distinguished from stock items on order detail lines by the absence of a warehouse code. Otherwise, with the exception of the adjustment of quantity levels and recalculation of cost fields, services and stock products are treated identically.

Services can be added to quotations, standard orders, scheduled sales orders, credit notes and credit reclaims, and purchase orders. If system key OPDESPADD is set to YES services can also be added at the despatch confirmation stage of sales order processing (the order discounts will not be recalculated). Services are not, however, copied to back to back purchase orders.

A specific type of service – a carriage charge – can be generated automatically at the end of Telesales Sales Order entry for selected Telesales customers. The charges are calculated from either the Carriage Charges table or the parameters defined in the ATCARRxxxx system keys. Several types of carriage can be defined in the Carriage Charges table but only one specific type of carriage charge can be allocated to each customer. Where the order is for a specific order type however, more than one type of carriage charge can applied to the order if a Carriage type is defined in the Order Types table.

Up to three fields on each service record can be used for analysing services according to type. These are labelled as Product groups A, B and C. They can be put to any purpose, according to the needs of an individual system. For example, they can group services hierarchically into main group (A), sub-group (B) and line (C), or they can be completely unrelated to each other. If you use Inventory Control, product group codes can be set up for reporting purposes and the calculation of period end reorder levels.

Additional product group fields and an additional option – Product Group Configuration (st_prod_grp_config) – are made available if your system is set up to use Product Hierarchies. The option Product Group Configuration allows you to impose varying degrees of validation on all the product group fields and designate one of the product group fields to hold a product hierarchy code.

Supplied services such as consultancy must be included in the EC Sales List from 1 January 2010. For a supplied service to be included in the EC Sales List from sales invoices posted via Accounts Receivable, Sales Invoicing, Telesales or Point of Sale:

• the Statistics indicator on the service record (either on the Service record directly or via the EC details when adding lines to an Accounts Receivable invoice or an invoice raised via Sales Invoicing (for invoices raised via Telesales or Point of Sale the flags must be set on the Service record directly – they cannot be added via an EC details action)) must be set to EC Sales List only or Both, and
• the Process indicator must be set to 3, and
• the invoice date must be on or after 01/01/2010.

If you do not use Inventory Control, all products are treated as services and are stored in the Services table.

Note that the Sales Order Processing Service table is completely independent of the Purchase Order Processing Service table.