Request for Suggestions/Ideas - Customer Store Credit

We are trying to customise the Sales invoice and PoS feature (both inbuilt PoS and PoS Awesome) to accomodate the use of store credits in retail environment.

A customer can have store credits as a result of any of the following incidences;

  1. Customer returns an item and the value is put in the customer’s account for use during the next purchase
  2. Customer makes purchase of NGN900 and pays NGN1,000. He has change of N100 but asks that this change be put in his account for subsequent use
  3. Customer does an exhange of product X for Product Y. X is more expensive than Y so customer has change. He asks for this to be put in his account for use in his next visit

At the moment ERPNext is totally incapable of handling any of this scenario in a seamless manner. This is very puzzling to users who are unable to understand how these very basic retail tasks that even the most basic of retail software handle easily is totally missing in ERPNext.

Methinks it is time to fix this.

The main challenges in ERPNext that makes these functions impossible are

  1. There is no option to use available store credit when creating a new sales invoice. None. I was thinking unused credit notes should show up in the “advance payments” table alongside payment entires. This is not the case.
  2. There is no option to convert customer change to store credit or a form of credit note during sales invoicing. None. In ERPNext a customer’s change is automatically assumed to be returned to the customer or written off to P&L
  3. More importantly it is not possible to have a sale and a return on the same invoice. This basically is the concept of a customer exchange. You return one item while buying another and the difference in prices (if any) is settled. This is not possible in ERPNext at the moment.

Like I said we are trying to make all these possible by customising the Sales Invoice and PoS documents.

We however need ideas on how the flows should be. Suggestions on how these functionalities should be incorporated are welcome and I hope this topic attracts a lot of traction. We cannot be the only ones perplexed about this rather obvious deficiency.

Ideas anyone ?

Olamide