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Re: Order/Inventory Problem in all versions, proposed solution



Hi Chris,

On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Chris Travers <..hidden..> wrote:
Hi everyone;

I have discovered a corner case which leads to onhand numbers being off.  Here is my proposed solution along with the problem description.  In future versions we will want to think of how we categorize inventory, but for now I think the proposed solution below is best.

The current approach is that if you "ship" or "receive" an order inventory gets automatically added to or subtracted from the onhand quantity for the parts.  Similarly the ship column in the order is filled in.  When you go to convert the order to an invoice the program detects whether the ship values are filled in and if they are, then onhand numbers are not adjusted.

This works fine if orders are fully billed *or* if orders go through the full shipping workflow, but if you enter ship numbers in the order screen it does not adjust the inventory at all when this is converted and this is a problem.

My proposed solution is to stop adjusting inventory on shipping and receiving and only do so on invoice.  This would provide a single place where the inventory numbers are guaranteed to change, and this would help.    I would like to further verify that we have proper accounting of goods shipped or received and not invoiced for inventory counting purposes.  We may need to do something regarding reporting here, because this is a behavior change, but currently both approaches have the capacity to create bad numbers, and I'd rather put in the effort to make sure this is working and robust than decline to fix something dangerously broken because it breaks workflows.

This sounds related to the issue on the users(?) list where users wanted to be able to ship after invoicing.

Would it be a solution to the problem above and the one I just referred to, to stop adding items to inventory on invoicing, requiring users to go through the ship/receive cycle?

Even though I'm not too fond of changing behaviors of the application this far into the life cycle, I'm all for changing workflows if that's required to fix fundamentally broken administration.

[A bit later]
Re-reading your "current approach" section, I'm wondering though: what if we would adjust the number by the "total number minus number shipped"? Would that not adjust by the right number? My point is that from what I understand, it's not possible to do shipments after an invoice has been posted against the order.


Bye,

Erik.