Our users have a history of altering our processes to match whatever the customer asks for. We have 2 main issues in how we setup our sales orders and I am trying to figure out all the things affected by these accommodations.
Change orders: Since we are a large equipment manufacturer, often times the details of the order change after it is entered and this may affect the price. We actually have a very nice process that keeps the prices, descriptions and comments in a UD table so we can see what has changed. Occasionally we have a customer that asks that we put all the change order cost on a separate line and they issue a new PO for the changes. Now we have a order line with nothing to ship against it and it needs to be handled manually in the invoice.
Freight charges: On a recent very large order, we had $146,000 in outbound freight charges. Normally we put estimated freight as a misc charge but again we have customers asking for it to be a separate line item. Sometimes the shipping department knows the freight cost and writes it on the packing slip and it is added as a miscellaneous charge to the shipment invoice. Some freight companies bill us the freight after the fact and we need to do a miscellaneous invoice for the freight. All of this leads to manual coding, confused customers and lots of room for errors.
I am open to ideas of how to make these situations work correctly or ammunition for the argument of why we can’t allow these changes.
In the past I have forced companies to decide on one way or the other. My preference is always use Misc Charges as it is easier to control on the SOAck and Pack Slip while also not requiring extra transactions. You can put a field on the Customer or Ship To to denote how they like their documentation and then create 2 report styles. 1 report style would be the standard that shows as Misc Charges and the 2nd one removes the reference to Misc Charges and instead adds them as a row under the line and adds in a subtotal for the line. Not great, but helps standardize your internal processes.
We have big (as in, their CEO’s probably have Lloyd Austin on their speed dial) customers that basically require separate line items for misc charges. At the same time, I do not allow users to enter charges as line items because dummy parts are a bad practice that leads to (among other issues) people simply forgetting to charge them.
So how did I square these? Ultimately, I decided it was an problem of presentation. To that end:
I added a “PO Line” UD field to the OrderMisc and InvMisc table, so PM’s and AR can associate our sales order misc charges with the Customer PO line item.
I changed the Order Confirmation (and invoice) to union the Order/InvDtl and Misc tables. Misc charges thus appear to show up as line items on the SO and Invoice. So you get Line 2 (shipped part), followed by (e.g.) line 2.1 and 2.2 for the charges. Each item has the corresponding customer PO line, making it easy for them to reconcile the charges. It even works flawlessly with a customer that uses OCR/AI to interpret all documents instead of an individual.
Below is a link to a thread talking about various ideas for handling Freight. Worth reading through if it give you some ideas.
We’re also in the same boat (with freight and change orders). We try to match the sales order with their PO’s for easy processing, but its a battle.
You could make a stock Part called “Change Order” and adjust a bunch into inventory at zero value. This would allow you to add “Change Order” as a line item on a SO, give it a price and a more detailed description, and just ship from stock along with the rest of the order (when it needs to appear on the invoice as a separate line).
When they have a separate PO number, it becomes harder to manage. There is a “PO Line” field on the Sales Order Line, which is MEANT to correspond to the Line Number on the main PO… but we’ve inserted secondary PO Numbers there. That value appears on packing lists and (I think) invoices. One issue is that secondary PO Number isn’t searchable from the SO landing page. But I think you can under the Customer > Activity > Orders because that list breaks it out by line item.
Wow. Thanks for the excellent feedback and ideas. I need to get a full understanding of our different situations and then I can look into how to implement these ideas. Appreciate all the help.