WHAT IF MY WINDOWS PC DOES NOT HAVE EXCEL INSTALLED OR MY EXCEL VERSION DOES NOT SUPPORT VBA MACROS? Contributed by: Elvire​​
For the people who don't have Excel, or who only use it online.
I found a website that sells a "refurbished" version of MS Office, with a legal key, for a really affordable price. What they do is that since Office 365 is now on subscription, they buy the old products back from businesses and get a new key from MS. MS doesn't care because they mostly don't support those products anyway and they still make some money out of it.
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They have a 4.8 (out of 5) on Trustpilot (I've checked). I bought it last night and Cosmetic Companion works perfectly well in it.​
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ENTERING MORE THAN 8 INGREDIENTS FOR A VARIANT
When creating a recipe where you want more than 8 ingredients for a variant you can use the GROUPING ingredients to achieve this. There are groupings for Natural, Exfoliant, Clay, Colours and Botanicals.
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You simply select the grouping you want and then enter the ingredients. Any safety regulations will be checked for the group as a whole.
DO THE POS OR PRODUCTION MODULES WORK ON THEIR OWN?
The basic module Cosmetic Companion is the corner stone and is always required. The additional modules Production and POS are optional but will not function independently from the basic module.
All 3 modules are linked and changes made in one module will automatically be reflected in the other modules. So, for example, changes made to stock in the production module show in the POS module to show how many products are available to sell.
WHY BUY THE POS MODULE AS WELL AS THE PRODUCTION MODULE
The additional modules deal with production and sales quite differently, although both have the basic functionality of the other.
The Production module concentrates predominantly on the detail of production, such as raw ingredient stock and purchasing, purchases, product pricing and label creation. The sales element simply records the sales of products.
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The POS (Point Of Sale) module conversely handles customer information, invoicing, loyalty schemes and sales tasks. The production element simply allows for product stock to be entered without any regard to the costs and ingredients involved to make the products.
HOW TO FIND OUT WHERE A SPECIFIC INGREDIENT IS USED
Perhaps, you have the opportunity to buy a bigger quantity of an ingredient at a much better price, and want to know which of your products use that ingredient. This is easily done in Companion. Go to the Recipes module and click the retrieve recipe button. Choose the 'Where used' option and a new window will appear. Choose the ingredient you are looking for and a drop-down list will appear showing all of the recipes where the ingredient is used. Double click on a recipe to recall it and see how much you are using in that particular recipe. You can keep clicking on the drop-down list to view more or all of the recipes.