I am still trying to figure out the best way to handle our workflow in ERPNext. It seems ERPNext is causing MORE work for our sales team and our bookkeeper and none of them are happy so I’m trying to determine how to fix this and need some input.
We are on ERPNext Cloud. We are drop ship company only - all goods delivered direct to customers from suppliers.
Scenario:
Customer places order with multiple items at one time. We source items from all different suppliers and create sales order. We create purchase orders for all suppliers. We receive invoices from each supplier and create purchase invoices. Once all purchase invoices are in, we create sales invoice for customer.
Seems simple enough until a wrench is thrown on nearly ever order - like supplier doesn’t ship all products, changes prices, customer calls to add an item to the order, etc…
The workflow is frustrating as it doesn’t allow us to easily update both the sales order and purchase order/invoice at one time. It also doesn’t allow us to update the sales order quantities or add/remove items after submission. How do others handle this?
Is it possible to keep the sales order in DRAFT status but still create purchase orders? If so, I believe that will be the simplest solution for now but I’m very curious how others handle these situations with changes in the order.
Seems this is the pretty unique case. Any thoughts on adding a custom field to update already shipping qty by the Supplier? Or giving restricted access to the supplier themselves to update item’s shipped qty?
In the above scenario, since there is uncertainty in quantity and 1:1 correlation of one supplier Is not linked to one customer order, this doesn’t seem like normal dropship model.
The better way could be separate SO and POs and then track the quantities by fictional on books warehouse. Fictional I mean to generate required reports, than actually having a physical warehouse. Just a thought.
Yes, custom field to update shipped qty seems reasonable. How would you suggest I achieve that? Add shipped qty on PI and pull that from the PI to SO? Issue is the SO is already submitted in order to generate the PO’s so I can’t update the SO at that point, as is my understanding. If I could update the SO after submission OR could generate POs without submitting, I think we’d be fine. But, these don’t seem to be options?
I can assure you this is a VERY normal drop ship model. You order items from multiple suppliers to fulfill the order. Entering one sales order per supplier is never going to work for any industry as that’s quite time consuming and doesn’t make sense to do it that way when you have one order with 30+ suppliers.
The reason customers come to a drop shipper (middle man) is because they don’t have the time or resources to shop around to all the suppliers and find what they need. Otherwise, they’d just go straight to buy from one supplier.