How to manage SKU's when purchasing software through a reseller

[bmaudlin]

Hey Guys,

The majority of our software purchases are carried out through a reseller, and currently we receive the resellers SKU for our software purchases rather than the vendors own SKU. 

As we receive the resellers SKU, these are typically not recognised by FNMS which drives in additional admin work into my team to create a licence of the back of a purchase, and room for error due to the manual nature of the task.

For people that have a similar purchase arrangement, how do you manage with the entry of SKU.

* Do you simply not bother.

* Do you just create a licence manually.

* Contact the vendor for the actual SKU.

* Should we be demanding our reseller provides us with the vendor SKU.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. 

Ben

[ChrisG]

I would be asking the reseller to provide the original publisher's actual SKU as part of their data feed to you. Most resellers are generally able to provide that on request (and if they can't it potentially raises questions about exactly what you have actually purchased).

[mfranz]

Agreed, they should be able to deliver this information as part of their service.

Edit: If it's a set of reoccurring SKUs, you could integrate a mapping in your import process and "translate" these reseller SKUs.

[kclausen · Accepted solution]

Yes, a common practice for a customer is to have their Software Reseller provide a weekly spreadsheet of all of the purchases the customer has made the prior week.  This spreadsheet would have fields such as the customer's PO Number and Date, Invoice Number, Item Description, Quantity, Unit Cost, Reseller SKU, Publisher Name and Publisher Part Number.

Software Resellers will have this information due to the nature of being in the middle of the supply chain.

The customer (you), places an order to a software reseller, which has the software resellers SKU.  The software reseller then must forward this on directly to the software publisher and on this order they must include the Publisher Part Number.  Therefore, the software reseller has both their internal SKU and the Publisher Part Number.

[bmaudlin]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your help on this one, this was my expectation that the reseller should be able to provide the original SKU as ultimately they have made the original purchase on our behalf. 

The reason of the question was that there was some push back on the requirement when I originally asked, so I will push this topic a little more firmly 🙂

Ben