I feel your pains friend. Same type of business here, and I'll tell you right now, there is no one easy or right way. We have struggled for years trying to arrange something that works good for us. For years we've use catagories to identify each unique vendor. They each have their own identifier that gets put into the name of their product... For instance Beach Road Farm's tomatoes will ring up as "(BRF) Tomatoes", if they have a different kind of tomato w/ a different wholesale price, we will have another item for that. Maybe "(BRF) Tomatoes, heirloom". Each week I make a new barcode sheet for all the fresh produce that is sold by weight and put it at the cash register. I have a spreadsheet that I paste a downloaded report into, which has a table of each item, it's wholesale and retail price, so that I can find out exactly how many lbs. $03.58 worth of Beach Road Farm's zucchini is... It's cumbersome, and I'm about to change it up to be more automated than that.
By including the wholesale and retail price in the items name, I can do away with the ever growing list of items and their prices... Naturally I don't want the customer to see your wholesale price on their receipt, so I'll have to come up with a way to scramble the wholesale price in the items name (or potentially in the barcode). A simple way would be to input the wholesale price backwards... And for our needs, we will still have to identify each item to a unique vendor, so I'll use a short abbreviation for that... So it might look like this "(01520BRF) Tomatoes, Heirloom - $2.99/lb." The first 5 numerical digits are the wholesale price backwards. $002.15 will become "51200". Now I've got everything I need... The wholesale price, retail price, vendor name, and its unit of measure.
Then all I need are some silly formulas in Excel to descramble the first part of the item name to know it's wholesale price and compare it to the retail price. Then another formula to find out it's unit (whether it's $2.99 per lb. or if its $2.99 each). It's a pretty tedius (but not that difficult) setup to start using, and there are a lot of places for error, but you're basically developing a piece of software at this point, which is by nature maticulous, time consuming, and often mind-numbing. Hope I didn't loose you there
If I wasn't the type of guy who likes to figure things out, and how it works, I would hire a developer to do this for me. It would be a few thousand dollars well spent if you ask me too.
