Sales returns and delivery notes

ERPNext
,
1

In our business case, we hire third party trnsporter to deliver our orders to custmers. Some orders sent to transporter, may not be accepted by the transporter as the vehicle doesn’t have enough space or vehicle has already left. Therefore, the orders are returned to our warehouse to be delivered on the next day. Upon receiving these orders to warehouse, we want to record that information in ERPNext. I thought of making a sales return and then creating a delivery note again for the next day. However, that is not working as expected where, the newly created delivery note status become ‘To bill’ regardless of having an invoice created on previous day. I tried this in two ways.

  1. Creating an invoice through sales order
  2. Creating an invoice through delivery note

In both instances, the delivery note status become ‘To bill’ regarless of having a sales invoice for full order quantity. Am I doing anything wrong here?

Below are the two scenarios tested.

Scenario 1 - creating an invoice through sales order

  • Created SO - Status - to deliver and bill
  • Create a delivery note (Sales order status changed to ‘To bill’)
  • Create an invoice by opening sales order (Sales order status changed to ‘completed’, sales invoice is ‘unpaid’)
  • Made a sales return against above delivery note (Sales order status changed to ‘to deliver’)
  • Created a delivery note again from sales order (Sales order status became ‘completed’)
  • The new delivery note status is ‘to bill’

Scenario 2 - Creating an invoice through delivery note

  • Created SO - Status - to deliver and bill
  • Create a delivery note (Sales order status changed to ‘To bill’)
  • Create an invoice by opening delivery note (Sales order status changed to ‘completed’, sales invoice is ‘unpaid’)
  • Made a sales return against above delivery note (Sales order status changed to ‘to deliver’)
  • Created a delivery note again from sales order (Sales order status became ‘completed’)
  • The new delivery note status is ‘to bill’

In both cases the the sales invoice is not cancelled. Since the sales order already has an invoice for all the quantity the new delivery note status should be ‘completed’. Am I doing anything wrong here or is it how it should work. Please explain.

2

Hello,

Ideally, you should not submit Delivery Note unless it’s accepted by the transporter. Perhaps the following workflow will be more suitable.

  1. When items are sent to the transporter, create/Save Delivery Note, but do not submit it.
  2. Once items are accepted by the transporter, submit that Delivery Note. For the returned items, let Delivery Note be at draft stage only.
  3. You can insert custom field in the Delivery Note to update next transportation/delivery date for items returned by the transporter.
  4. If you need to create Sales Invoice after delivery only, then create Sales Invoice from Delivery Note. If that’s not mandatory, then you can create Sales Invoice from Sales Order as well. Irrespectively, all the transactions in a chain will be updated.

Hope this helps.

3

Thanks @umair for your detailed explanation. The process I am going to propose is that cancel the delivery note if it was not accepted by the transporter and amend it to have new transporter details. Also, create a report that shows what is scheduled for delivery for a particular date so they can cross check deliveries.

Thanks again!

I’ll be asking lot of questions while I am going through my first ERPNext implementation.