Allocation, Despatching and Invoicing

[Alec H]

I have a problem that I am hoping that the 'great minds' using this forum will help me to bottom out

The Company I work for distribute electrical products to established customers throughout the UK. All our orders are received either by fax, email or telephone and then manually entered into Sage Line 50. Some order are for stock items, some non-stock and some a mixture of both.


My problem centers around the order allocation through to invoice process.

Currently the process we follow is thus;

1. Customer order loaded onto the system

2. Warehouse staff conduct a simple search for outstanding orders and then allocate stock against all showing as outstanding.

3. All the allocated orders are then Despatched (but not invoiced) and delivery notes are printed

4. The warehouse pick and pack the orders from the delivery notes.

5. At end of day, all the orders that have been allocated through the day are invoiced.

Note : The reason we don't invoice as we go is that it is very common for customers to change their orders (eg change a quantity) and it is much easier for us to accommodate that if the order can simply be amended.

OK, onto the problem...

1. Once the warehouse has done its allocation of orders (step 2 above) if any other goods are booked in (goods received) during the day, we have to produce a report for each of the received items to check if there are any outstanding orders against them. If there are we then go in manually and allocate and despatch them. We think we have to do it this way because if we simply re-allocate against ALL outstanding orders we will then not be able to tell which orders have just allocated and which ones were done earlier in the day therefore risking duplication of deliveries.


In an "ideal" world if we could identify any one of the following things we wouldn't have a problem doing multiple allocations throughout the day.

a) Whether a delivery note has already been printed.

or

b) The time the order was allocated

or

c) The time the order was despatched

Is it possible to get any of these details from Line 50?

All comments and help appreciated

We are using Sage Line 50 Financial Controller version 12.01.0034

[brucedenney]

Sounds like your stock control is not good. You need to address that core issue.

Procedure should be.

Order entered onto system and stock allocated to order, if order can not be fulfilled, then stock might be de-allocated and assigned to another order so that it can be fulfilled.

Fully allocated orders are then printed (in sequential order to be picked by the warehouse)

Outcome A - If the warehouse can not pick the items (because stock control is wrong) the order is unallocated and the stock levels of the item are adjusted to be correct.

Outcome B - If the warehouse can pick all the items, they are packaged up and despatch, the invoice created, the shipping documentation done.

Keeping all orders open just so people can change their orders is not going to make life easy. It will make life expensive and time consuming. If they need to add then they will have to place an extra order, if they want to return goods already shipped they will have to go through the returns process.

You could do additional invoices/credit notes for the adjustments. and leave the boxes open so they could be altered, but you are making a rod for your own back in many ways.

If goods come in during the day, then they can be allocated to the outstanding items left on back order, additional picking slips printed and the good potentially put in the same box as the earlier part of the order they would though be invoiced separately.

Stock Items have the following status

Unallocated = not in stock, part of the order requirement
Allocated = in stock waiting to be shipped
Complete = invoiced in the box ready to go or gone

If there are incomplete items on an order then there is nothing to stop you finding the previous shipment, seeing it was today and finding the box in despatch, opening it up and adding / removing items.

You might be interested in a bespoke ordering system, to raise Purchase orders for Sales orders requirements, adding the SOP numbers onto the PO so when the PO comes in, you can see, which orders the items go on from the PO or one that tags Sales orders as having been ordered or both.

The order requirement, is the total outstanding qty of the item in SOP + the minimum stock level of that item, less any "allocated", less any "on order".