In many cases a customer is looking to merge sales of old item data into a newer existing item so that they can get a more complete historical record of sales. Sometime an item's sku number may change in the retailer's own reporting system.  Lots of times a new sku is generated simply due to a minor packaging change, or some other factor not critical to the item's performance. When this happens, the history can become muddled. But we don't want to simply change the item number historically as this will mean that the new item data will never align with the historical base data.  Instead, we can get around this by creating a categorization of items that for most items is just its item number.  In the case of the old item number that we want consolidated, we'll use the new items' value for this category - that way when we report on the category and aggregate by it, the sales of old and new will be combined into one nice total. This document provides some strategies on how to manage these changes to get a flexible picture without altering history in the database itself.

Step-by-step guide

Add the steps involved:

1. Identify the old and new item numbers for each item you have.
2. Choose one of the 24 categorization fields and delineate one of them as "Common Item" or some other label to highlight the purpose.
3. We'll copy each item's retailer item number into the chosen field above.
4. We'll take the the new item numbers for each of the items we want to merge in step 1 and copy the new item over the old item number in step three.
5. What this does is create a "category" that looks like an item, but allows us to group by the "Common Item" category, thereby summing sales and merging the old item sales into the new item's category.

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