I am new to Epicor (2 weeks in) and I am trying to investigate some issues. We often times quote orders as exworks. The order is then prepared, customer is contacted with shipping weight and dimensions to arrange shipment, and they ask us to prepay the shipment and add it to the invoice (PPA). We proceed to book and pay the for the shipment, but are failing to link it to the sales order and invoice our customer for it.
Is there a foolproof way to link the freight invoice to our sales order to ensure it gets added to the original invoice?
We get one invoice from our carriers at the end of the month (we do not issue a PO for freight each time we ship).
I think our issue is that we do not have an inside sales team yet to manager the order once it has been entered. With your idea, our shipper can notify an inside sales rep to make a revision to the existing order by creating a âNew Line Chargeâ with the estimated amount of the freight. This ensures that come time to invoice, we do not forget to invoice the freight!
Our fiance department will still ask how to link the freight we actually paid to our order. Perhaps we give our carrier our internal order number as a reference. When they invoice us for freight, it will have the order number listed in the line item for each shipment they made. Finance will then be able to go into the order to update the misc charge to be the exact amount we paid. However, I see payment terms getting in the way of this idea. If the freight company only invoices us at the end of the month and we invoice our customer once we ship, we wonât be able to invoice them the exact amount (unless our shipper collects the quoted cost upfront before we ship).
I really appreciate your reply, it is nice to have somewhere to chat about these issues. I am used to SAP which seems to have a plethora of online resources.
The carrier should give you some sort of âtrackingâ number. Have the Shipping people update the packer with that number. Then that can be pulled into the invoice (for Shipment types).
Even if you donât pull it into the invoice, the invoice will still reference a Packer, which will include the shippers tracking #. The shippers invoice should have that same info on it.
Not quite. We discovered that the MISC charge we would add to the Sales Order, would appear on the invoice and the customer wouldnât pay our invoice because the freight charge was never on their original purchase order to us. Then they would offer to pay the actual freight if we provided the freight invoice. However, our carriers only invoice at the end of the month. Their invoice has no reference that makes any sense to our customer so it was a big waste of effort.
We are now quoting freight upfront to our customers and having them add this to their purchase order. The freight charge is added at the beginning and there are no surprises for our logistics team.
How do you get the exact charge ahead of time? It often seems to be different in the end for us, various random fees get tacked on or the pallet had to be larger then predicted, etc.
Our outbound freight represents a significant dollar value so we quote during the Sales Order process.
We are looking to setup Freight as a non-inventory part to track. We are still in the early days of understanding this in Epicor so thereâs a chance it good change.