Hi all,
Looking for some inspiration here.
Booking freight
For those of you who book freight through a carrier/freight forwarders, how do you keep track of which Sales Orders have actioned against?
Costs
Are you tracking freight costs from the supplier vs freight costs charged to the customer? If so, how?
I always recommend using the Miscellaneous Charges for freight because you can assign a separate GL Control Code to them. So, if you are charging a customer $100 for freight, you can point it to a GL account for Customer Outgoing Freight. Then, when you get the bill from the carrier and it is only $75, you can post that to another GL account for Outgoing Freight Paid. You will see that there is a $25 dollar variance that you can automatically post to a revenue account through a recurring journal.
Thanks. Yeah we’re using the misc charge and tying it to the relevant GL codes.
Operationally we have no way of keeping track which sales orders have had transport booked for them.
Buying off a Non-stock/Non quantity bearing item doesn’t seem to work either as it generates PPV for every PO raised.
Is transport just not supported natively in Epicor?
I’m not sure, but you might want to look into Epicor’s shipping software. I have not used it so I can’t speak to it.
We’ve been using the Transport Management “Extended Solution” developed by Epicor CSG in the UK. It allows for the creation of a Transport Schedule (based on Routes and Areas, which you can choose to use or not) with various properties related to a trip, delivery or shipment. The Transport Schedule then gets assigned to Order Releases so you can determine what is scheduled on each delivery and in what ordered it is to be loaded/unloaded. We’ve built additional dashboards around the solution that allow us to see opportunities to load more on our trucks (bottom-up looking at Order Releases) and determine order readiness via production and packing status (top-down looking at the entire truck). It doesn’t deal with the mechanics of accounting - you’ll still need Misc Codes and GL controls for that - but you can carry data on the Transport entity related to revenue and cost if you desire.
Hope this helps. Your Epicor CAM can be a resource for this, but they’ll need to go looking for the “Extended Solution” as this isn’t a module natively advertised with the application.
Very interesting David.