Accessories are Products or Labor Items that are associated with another Product/Labor Item in your Catalog.
Accessories help you not forget to add Product/Labor Items associated with the "parent" Item. Use Accessories when you want mandatory or optional Products/Labor Items to be associated with a "parent" item.
Accessories can be added to multiple Items at a time within the Product Explorer and Labor Explorer interfaces. Just select the Items that you wish to accessorize and from the Tools menu click Accessories->Selected:
This will open the Update Accessories form:
Here you can click the [Add Product] or [Add Labor] buttons to add accessories to the selected Items. You can also Paste any Items that you have previously copied. There is a [Delete] button to remove Accessories:
When Accessories are added, the Prompt and Recommend options are pre-checked:
Prompt
This setting will trigger a prompt window for the accessory when the "parent" Product is added to a Project/Service Order. If you uncheck this box, the accessory will automatically be added to the Project/Service Order when the "parent" Product is added.
Recommend
This setting will pre-select the accessory in the prompt window within a Project/Service Order. Unchecking this box will require you to check the box within the prompt window. This is useful for accessories that are optional or only needed occasionally.
The shot below shows the prompt window for accessories within a Project. For this example, the "Recommend" option was unchecked in the Catalog for the programming Labor Item:
Non-Billable
Checking this option will zero out the Price of the Product within the Project file, but not the Cost. It also zeroes out any labor being charged for the Product, but not the Cost of the Labor. This option is useful for Products that you want to use on Drawing Pages that "come with" another product and should not be charged for within a Project.
The Quantity field is editable.
You can use the [Update] button to change the Prompt and Recommend settings for multiple Items at a time:
There are two options on this form regarding adding the selected Accessories:
You can also add accessories to individual Products/Labor Items via the Accessories tab in the Edit Product and Edit Labor forms.
On the Accessories tab for an Item, there is a "Summarize in Client Reports" option. When this is checked, the accessories will not display on Proposal reports.
The "parent" Item's price will have an asterisk next to it indicating that the price includes accessories.
When "Summarize in Client Reports" option is unchecked, the accessories will display beneath the "parent" product. By default, pricing for the accessories will not display on the Proposal report. However, this can be changed, see below.
The Report Definitions for Proposal reports have a few options relating to Accessories.
Summarize Accessories? - the default is "Item" which means that the report will treat each Item with Accessories based on the "Summarize in Client Reports" option. You can override this setting whenever you want by choosing "All" or "None".
Show detail pricing? - will display the price of Accessories when choosing to show Accessories on the report.
Notice that in the image above that the "parent" item still shows the price including Accessories. There is another Report Parameter you can change to have the "parent" item just display its price. However, if you use this option you must choose to not summarize any Accessories and you must choose the "Show detail pricing?" Parameter described above. If you do not do both of these thing, your pricing on your Proposal will be wrong, i.e. the prices of Accessories will not be included on the report.
There is also a Report Setting named "Keep accessories with parent". The default is "True" and setting this to "False" will not list the Accessories beneath the "parent" Item: