For a retail or wholesale business to effectively organize shipping of orders, informing them of a specific ship date is a must. The Purchase Order Reservation Ship Date Enhancement in Connected Business allows you to automatically adjust the ship date on the sales order relative to the date as to when you will receive the items purchased from your supplier.
In Connected Business, it works two-way to update a Sales Order/Invoice ship date:
- When receiving items from Purchase Order(s) with the same due dates, the Sales Order/Invoice ship date will be updated equal to the due date the items are received.
- When receiving items from Purchase Order(s) with the different due dates, the Sales Order/Invoice ship date will be updated depending on the selected order ship date. Order Ship Date can either be the Earliest Possible Date or the Latest Possible Date which depends upon the customer’s request.
With these scenarios, you can advise your customers as to when you will be able to ship their orders.
For reference, these are the definitions:
| Due Date |
Defined as the date indicated in the Purchase Order form as to when the items can be received on the Seller’s end. |
| Ship Date |
Defined as the date indicated in the Sales Order/Invoice form as to when the items can be shipped or delivered to the Customer. |
Let me illustrate how this new feature works in Connected Business. This process includes the processing of orders to and from the Customer and Supplier module.
Purchase Stock for an Item. We will take an example having an out of stock item that needs to be replenished. Say you created two purchase orders with different due dates. You can check these values through the Inventory Item Grid. To create a new Purchase Order, go to the Supplier module > Purchases > New Purchases and then select an active supplier from the list.
Add an item on the Inventory item grid then enter the quantity you want to purchase. Make sure that the item not reserved to any Sales Order/ Invoice transactions.
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Create another Purchase order. You may duplicate the previous purchase order to make it easier.
The due dates of the purchase order can be modified in different dates or same dates. For this illustration, we will set different due dates for each purchase orders to show the process which ones you can apply in the sales order.
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Reserve the Purchased Item to an Order. Assuming that a Sales Order has also been created and these purchase orders have been reserved to this Sales Order. To create a Sales Order, you may go to the Customer module > Order > New Order and then select an active customer from the list.
Add the item (the same item in the Purchase order) in the Inventory grid and enter the quantity. Save the Sales Order form.
Make sure that the allocated column is zero so the items will be auto-reserved.
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Receive the Purchased Order Transaction. To reflect the purchase order on your ledger, you have to post the purchase order by clicking on the Goods Received form. To do this, go to the Supplier module > Received > Goods Received then click the recently created purchase order on the Available Purchase Orders tab. Double Click the purchase orders on the list.
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While posting the Goods Received form, a Choose Order Ship Date window will display. You can either choose on the Select Earliest or the Select Latest date option, this will reflect the ship date on the reserved Sales Order. Click on OK button to continue.
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Check back on the Sales Order recently created and view the Ship Date column where the shipping date has been changed to the selected order ship date.
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I hope this blog post helps you in automating ship dates for your sales orders if you have purchases from your suppliers that are to be received on future dates. Thanks for dropping by!