How do I manage a cold Storage Business, where I recive goods from my customers, store them for a period, maitaning templeature logs etc. And charge my customers the rent for the period for the stored items from those customers in erpnext.
The question is too broad with too little information or context.
How are you handling it now?
Do only charge “rent” based square area?
Do you charge for handling, moves, etc?
Are there any special charges?
Do you provide insurance based on value of merchandise?
What are unique costs to specific transactions that you’d like to track?
Thnx for the promt reply. I will answer your questions one by one.
How are you handling it now?
- Well for now i am using busy. in busy I get the product/inventery from customers and take it as purchase @ 0 amount and put it into the warehouse with batch No. as identification.
Do only charge “rent” based square area?
- I charge rent on per unit bases for a season with bill sundries Loading and off loading charges and GST on services.
Do you charge for handling, moves, etc?
- Loading and offloading charges are the handling charges.
Are there any special charges?
- Not right now but can be added in future.
Do you provide insurance based on value of merchandise?
- Not right now but can be added in future.
What are unique costs to specific transactions that you’d like to track?
- like moving inventory from one warehouse to another etc.
Hi,
My Main issue is how to manage invertory of the customers and charge rent for the product recieved from the customers.
This will involve a fairly extensive customization, especially if you have varying rates based on duration. This is something I call “UOM Dynamic Pricing”.
I started a development for an equipment rental company. They had an hourly rate, Daily rate, weekly rate (4-7 days), and a monthly rate (4 weeks). This involved creating a custom script to set the UOM/Price based on a start datetime and an end datetime. I never finished it because the client cancelled the project.
If you don’t have familiarity with ERPNext, it’s going to be difficult for you to make some of the core decisions:
- Will you use Items and Inventory to correlate your total square footage. When a customer “consumes” square footage you remove it from inventory so you don’t over allocate. How will you invoice based on duration?
- Will you keep a separate Service Item to make invoice charges for picks/moves/special handling?
- If you rent by the season, can you sell/rent a partial duration?
- What’s the smallest unit you’ll rent for the season?
You may have a better experience with hiring an experienced partner to implement this. If you’re going to tackle it on your own, expect this to take a year or more. I’ve been intensively working with Frappe Framework and ERPNext for nearly three years. I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface and can finally be productive with customization and development for extending these applications.
Other areas you may consider:
Subscription plan may work well for “renting storage space”
Doctype Perhaps you’ll create a custom doctype to record the status/location/customer/value/etc of Items that you’re storing for a customer.
Projects Are a good way to track income and expenses on a ‘micro’ scale. Perhaps you can modify the project doctype to manage each “cold storage instance”.