Overview
Before you can sell assets or entitlements to a sponsor, you must add them to your inventory. To add new inventory items, select the Inventory tab in the Sponsorship module (or in the Gen 2 modules, navigate to Configuration Records > Inventory Items). Next, open the overflow menu and select Create New Inventory Item to add one using the web interface, or Excel Import/Export to add items in bulk (see below).
In the web interface, there are several sections where you may enter details as described below. Once you've added an inventory item, you must create at least one rate card for it before you can include the item in a deal.
Item details
General
Name
Every inventory item must have a name.
Product
Use this to organize the inventory item. In the web UI, the Product list also shows the Category name at the beginning of each entry. In the Excel sheet for bulk upload, these are two different columns.
Unit
Set a unit to determine how the inventory item's availability is described. There are three options:
- Commodity: Items with no specific limit on how many may be sold, such as social media posts or merchandise.
- Physical: Items with a specific quantity available to sell—even if they aren't tangible—such as fixed signage or presenting sponsor entitlements.
- Time: Items sold according to how long they'll be active, such as LED signage or radio and TV spots. These will always be measured in seconds.
Tip: Only use "time" if you specifically need to track the number of seconds available to sell. For example, suppose you have a digital sign where customers might buy different amounts of time. If you set the unit to "time" and the available quantity to 7200 seconds (2 hours) per event, all sales will deduct a number of seconds from the same pool.
If you always sell that asset in identical blocks of time, it's easier to track availability and read reports if you set the unit to "physical". You could then set the rate card's unit of sale to 1, the unit of sale description to "10 minute spot", and the available quantity to 12 (for a total of 2 hours of spots) per event.
Assignment
This specifies how the item is delivered. Choose Seasonal if the item is only delivered once, such as fixed signage. Choose Individual if staff must take action to deliver it at each event—even if it's sold on a full-season basis—such as a promotional tent or a presenting sponsor entitlement.
Other fields
Division—The business unit that sells this inventory item. If left empty, it will be unavailable through the Deal Manager.
Owner—Defaults to the signed in user, but can be manually assigned to another user. This is useful for approval workflows.
Channel—Deprecated. (Used by Media Manager.)
Allocation Restriction—Deprecated. (Used by Service Console.)
Advanced
Disable Proration—When a deal is sold at less than the combined rates of all the inventory it includes, each item is proportionately discounted by default. If you tick this option, this item will be excluded from that calculation. This is typically used when an organization's sponsorship representatives sell assets for other departments such as ticketing.
Manager Only—If ticked, only users with the " prv_manager_only_inventory" privilege can add this item to a deal.
Margin—Categorize the item as high or low margin.
Is Package—This inventory item will be a bucket containing several normal inventory items to sell together.
Only In Package—This inventory item can only be sold as part of a package.
Do Not Rollover—If you roll over (copy) inventory to another season, this item will not be included.
Event Assignment—Deprecated. (Used by Service Console.)
Expiring Events—Deprecated. (Used by Service Console.)
Other sections
Legal
The Legal Name field specifies the name of the item as it should be written in contracts. This can be used by templates. Use the Legal Order field to specify how items should be ordered when rendering reports or mail merges so the most important items are always at the top.
Legal Remarks are specific phrases that may be used when generating a contract. These phrases are included in a contract only if the applicable rate card references them using the @ITEMREMARKS token.
KONNECT
If your organization uses Activate (formerly called KONNECT) to manage asset delivery, this section allows you to provide additional details or hide the item from Activate.
Valid events
When initially creating an inventory item, this section will be blank. If at least one rate card exists and you come back to edit the item later, this displays how many events in the default season that the item is available for. This is a read-only section and cannot be changed here.
Add in bulk
When you need to add a large number of inventory items, using the web interface can be cumbersome. You can instead use the Excel Import/Export function to add these items more efficiently.
Note: When adding inventory items in bulk, you must also provide rate card details.
First, use the Export function to download an Excel sheet to use as a template. Select the season you'll be adding inventory for. You can optionally adjust the filters to change which inventory items will be in the Excel sheet, if any currently exist in the season and have rate cards. Click Export to generate and download the spreadsheet.
Next, open the spreadsheet and enable editing. For each new inventory item to add, list it on a new row and fill in the data you have available.
Do not change the KORE ID fields in the first three columns—the system will use these if they are present to update existing items, and it will generate these for you if the item is new.
Required fields:
- Category Name
- Product Name
- Name
- Unit
- Inventory Assignment
- Rate Card Assignment
- Rate
- UoS (Unit of Sale)
Caution: Be sure to use consistent spelling, otherwise the system will create unintended records (categories, products, etc.) using the typo or alternative spelling.
Tip: To rename an existing division, product, or category, use Configuration Records instead.
When finished, save the file and return to your web browser. In the Import section, choose the correct season from the selection box. Change any of the other options if desired, then click Browse to select your file, and finally click the Import button.
The progress window will show you how many items are being added along with any errors. If there are errors, click View Results to see which rows have issues.
Warning: Do not change the spreadsheet you uploaded and resubmit it—that would create duplicate rate cards for the items that initially succeeded. Instead, either remove all the non-error lines from your edited spreadsheet or export a fresh template. (The newly added items will have KORE IDs in the first three columns which prevents them from being duplicated.)
