How does one put a service contract as a line on a sales order?

Kinetic ERP
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1

Looking in the database, erp.orderDtl has a column LineType which can be PART or CONTRACT, but for the life of me I can’t see how to add a line item for a contract to a sales order.

I am wanting to put our service contract as lines on sales orders and bill them that way, as opposed to just doing contract billing… if its possible.

Why?

  1. provide a natural place to store the customer’s PO
  2. when customers buy a contract we allow them to pay for it using their “Loyalty Credits” (a customization we have in place). We have a LOYALTY CREDIT part that we put on a line, and our BPMs deduct its price from the sales order price and also from our “Loyalty_Balance_c” UD field on the customer (simplistically speaking, there’s probably a bit more to them than that)

We would need to reimplement the BPMs on service contract entry on service contract entry otherwise, which is our fallback position.

Separate thought: If we can add the contract as a sale order line, I assume we leave “ready to Invoice” unchecked on the sales orders so the Sales order handles the invoicing and we don’t get a double up?

2

The service contract offering is notoriously weak in Epicor, which is why we are writing our own. In classic Epicor, there was a ‘New Contract Line’ option is Order Entry. is that not available in Kinetic ?

3

I just found it in Kinetic

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2 Likes
4

Nice. I like that. What happens to the balance if they do an RMA or some sort of credit?

5

@Hally I wasn’t directly involved in the implementation, but I believe we have a LOYALTYCREDIT part we can put on sales orders at whatever value we decide, and a BPM fires to adjust dbo.Customer.LoyaltyBalance_c (we also track loyalty spent and earnt as well as the balance). It also adds the LOYALTY CREDIT part line at $0 price with a discount thus reducing the overall order price. Certain classes of part we sell earn loyalty credits also via BPMs, but there’s no BPMs on service contracts at the moment.

@AndyGHA I also found the New Contract Line menu option but not having much luck with it; I enter the contract number, (pink as its a test environment :blush: )

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…Brings across the price and details… all good.

But I need to ship the sales order to invoice it, and I then get stuck:
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I don’t understand what its on about, line and release both have order qty 1: ** UPDATE this error message is coming from one of our own BPMs, will look at with our BPM developer :slight_smile: **

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1 Like
6

looks like that’s coming from an exception in the catch part of the code widget in that bpm on CustShip.Update

7

Indeed it is, have sent it off for review by those who know their C# from their D flat.

1 Like
8

Maybe its an E minor. LOL :rofl:

9

SUCCESS UPDATE

We were able to successfully put the contract on a sales order, which allowed us to add our loyalty discount part, and invoice it successfully.

Key points:

  • Don’t mark contract as ready to invoice , so it doesn’t get picked up by contract billing when invoicing.
  • After sales order is invoiced, Contract state changes to invoiced. (Like you would normally expect, but somehow with Epicor it came as a pleasant surprise!)
  • I think we will mix direct contract billing with contract billing via sales order. The latter adds some extra steps but at least provides a natural home to record the customer PO and a means to do our discounting when needed.

Anyone else doing contract billing have any other guidance as to pros and cons of one approach vs the other?