Subject Area Concepts The forecourt selling process introduces a new twist to the ARTS Operational Data Model representation of a retail transaction. Earlier releases of the ARTS Operational Data Model assumed that fulfillment (the act of taking an item out of inventory and giving it to the customer) was synonymous with recording the sale of the Item. This assumption is evidenced by the relationship betweenSaleReturnLineItem and InventoryTransactionJournalEntry. The sale or return of an item is immediately reflected as a change to item inventory through this relationship. The defining feature of the Forecourt retail segment is that fulfillment is always separated from selling. Either the customer fills up the car with fuel before going inside the store to pay, or the customer pays before putting a set amount of fuel into the car. This separation of fulfillment from selling means that for a dispensed fuel sale, the inventory is debited at the time of the fuel delivery via a FuelingTransaction, and the matching credit to Tender is made via the RetailTransaction that sells the delivery. Thus, principle 2 does not hold true when a dispensed fuel sale is being sold because the retail transaction will have an unbalanced credit to a tender account. This distinction between dispensing and selling fuel would not be important if it were not for the fact that some (a very few) FuelingTransactions are not sold. This can happen for two reasons: •The FuelingTransaction is a test delivery which is performed by consumer protection agencies to verify the accuracy of the fuel pump. In such cases the fuel delivered is normally poured back into an underground storage tank and not necessarily the same one the fuel came from; and •The FuelingTransaction remains unsold because the customer has filled up the car and simply driven off without paying. Such DriveOffTransactions become a known source of shrink in the store's perpetual inventory. Logical 20030 - Forecourt Transaction View presents the Forecourt Transaction view which illustrates the separation of fulfillment from selling of a fuel delivery. When the FuelSalesLineItem happens before the FuelingTransaction commences it is a "Prepay" fueling transaction, and when the fueling transaction is completed before the fuel sales line item is added to a retail transaction it is a "Postpay" fueling transaction. To put it another way, a prepay FuelSalesLineItem authorizes one or more nozzles on a FuelingPoint to commence a FuelingTransaction, while a post-pay fuel sales line item sells a previously completed FuelingTransaction. When a prepay FuelSalesLineItem results in a fueling transaction of less monetary value than the originating prepay, then a second "prepay refund" fuel sales line item must be entered into a retail transaction to record the refunding of the unused amount of the prepay. Drive off transactions occur when a customer pumps gas and then leaves the fueling point without paying. This results in a DriveOffTransaction which a subtype of ForecourtTransaction which is a type of Transaction. With release 6.1, the addition of the WriteoffLineItem enables the model to properly reflect the fuel loss event as a forecourt transaction and tie it to a retail transaction to record the financial impact of the drive off event. The write off properly debits the loss as a kind of expense. The TransactionAssociation entity connects the forecourt drive off transaction to the financial retail transaction. This approach closes a gap in the release 6.0 model. |