[coldrick]

Hi

Still evaluating Enterprise version and I've come across a function for which I don't understand the purpose. It looks like a potentially dangerous function and there doesn't seem to be a way of turning it off or preventing access to it.

If an operator creates a Sales Order and marks the status as "Delivered" (Maybe they gave the customer the goods thinking that they would send them an invoice later or maybe they just inadvertently clicked the status dropdown to delivered), what happens to that transaction?

It appears to just remain in Sales Orders with a "Delivered" status, whilst the customer never gets charged, the stock never gets reduced and no replacement stock ever gets ordered.

There also seems to be no easy way of reconciling "delivered" Sales Orders with no corresponding invoice.

What would be the purpose of that feature?

[COBS Tech Support]

The purpose of the function is to take items out of the back order control centre if for some reason there is no longer a requirement to ship those goods.

Sorry, I cannot follow the logic behind the statement that you consider this function "dangerous" ? If you are permitting an operator to enter goods, amend goods, cancel goods, etc., why would such a feature be any more or any less "dangerous" than letting an operator do anything else that may effect the status of an order...?

Possibly your concern is that a user may set the status to "delivered" thinking that this will "cause" the items to be shipped to the customer. Hopefully there is already a protocol in place to ensure that goods do not leave a business without accompanying invoice documentation. In this case, setting an order's status to "delivered" manually has no effect on the monies that the customer owes.

[coldrick]

Yes, I guess it is more that we need to get familiar with some of the terminology and how the system works and to educate our staff with what we find.

Our first instinct when we saw the "delivered" option in Sales Orders was...

- Assuming a company operates on a Sales Entry system with a central invoicing done by another person or department using Backorder Control.
- The sales person entering the Sales Order isn't allowed to create the invoices as they need to be checked by the invoicing people.
- A customer requests his goods on the spot, so the sales person marks the sales order as "Delivered" (and gets the appropriate signature from the customer to say he has received the goods).

Unfortunately if this is done (yes the sales person made an error - he was new on the job), there is nothing in the system to alert anyone to the error.

We plan to try creating a report later after we get all the essentials set up to see if we can list Sales Orders without matching Invoices. I hope it's possible.

[COBS Tech Support]

Yes the sales order number is stored in a reference field on the final invoice so it possible to cross-match the transaction.

However, if this is a concern there are many different ways you might approach this. Here are a few suggestions although you may have better ideas of your own:

1. Design the form such that if the sales order is marked as "delivered" cancel the printing so the form doesn't print.

2. Block the operator from saving a sales order in the 'delivered' state unless the operator has an administrator level password. (Use the sales order save hook to check for this.)

3. If an operator has marked a sales order as delivered, display a messagebox confirming the action, and prompt for an administrator level password before the action can be completed. (Use the sales order save hook to check for this.)

4. Place a message in large bold type at the top of the sales order acknowledgement form that goods are not to leave the premises without an accompanying invoice.

[coldrick]

That's great. You guys seem to have a solution for almost everything.