ERP Best Practices – Shipping, Receiving and Invoicing Notes

Hi Everyone,

The purpose of this post is to share ADempiere and iDempiere, open source ERP, best practices when communicating notes and instruction between order entry, receiving, fulfillment and invoicing. This topic is commonly discussed in high-volume wholesale distribution and manufacturing. There are two options built into ADempiere and iDempiere to accomplish this task:

1. Create Products to represent your notes. In addition to creating your normal stocked products and services, you can include predefined notes in your product list. Doing so makes order entry much more intuitive. These notes will print like any other line for receiving manifests, pick tickets or packing slips.
2. Create Charges to represent your notes. Instead of adding a product to your orderline, you add a charge. Using a charge minimizes where the instructions print. It also has the added benefit of only posting on invoices (not shipments/receipts). Therefore, if you want to have a non-zero cost for the note and you do not want to affect MR or Shipment GL posting, the charge note is a great candidate.

Using the Charge to specify shipping and receiving notes, works out of the box. You can ship and receive the charge. As a result, the order will flag that charge as having been delivered at the specified quantity. Even though the shipment/receipt can include a charge, the GL will not be affected by its presence.

I prefer to use the product to specify notes based on my experience. Doing so gives you access to more of the system’s built-in abilities. However, it is important to know that using a zero-cost product, like recommended above, requires you to modify the code. In it current state, ADempiere and iDempiere will throw an error when trying to post a vendor-related shipment/receipt with a zero cost. This situation is good when discussing real products; however, it interferes with receiving instructions. The customer-related shipments and receipts work just fine so long as the product is flagged as not-stocked. Please be aware the fix to work around this situation is simple.

Side note: Don’t be afraid to modify code. ERP is all about productivity, insight, accuracy and ultimately accountability. Every system has limitations. With ADempiere and iDempiere, you gain the freedom and flexibility to accomplish high-reward and low-effort changes that yield big results. There are no valid reasons to be stuck with a 7-step process that should only take 2 steps.

If you have questions about this topic, or if you would like help modifying the code to do exactly what you want, let me know. I am happy to fix it for you or teach you how to fix it yourself.

ADempiere vs iDempiere vs Openbravo vs Compiere

Please note that ADempiere, iDempiere and Openbravo are forks or copies from Compiere. Therefore, they have similar abilities mentioned above. The biggest difference is that ADempiere and iDempiere are pure open source. There are no features held behind a commercial or paid license.