Re: Can sales orders affect inventory?

[David Ratte <..hidden..>]

What you are asking about is called MRP (material resource planning) and is 
traditionally beyond the scope of an "accounting package". A package that 
does both accounting and materials planning (plus a few other things) is 
generally called ERP or enterprise resource planning which would then have an 
MRP module.

The whole function of MRP is to plan forward based on 'real orders' with 
differing specific shipdates and 'proposed' orders with different shipdates. 
It helps to organize your manufacturing operation bringing in all the 
necessary materials at the latest possible date to meet your shipments. A 
good one allows you to 'what-if' so if someone calls to place and order 3 
months out, you can quickly see how filling this order would affect your 
other customers.

One of the most detailed (open-source) ERP applications I've seen is Compiere 
which has a STEEP learning curve and requires JAVA (yuk).

A glance at sourceforge shows 16 MRP projects (there used to be only 1 or 2 
last time I looked some years ago)

It's quite likely that you could adapt one of these to take inputs from your 
postgresql SL database. I had done that a few years ago with SQL-Ledger, but 
that was at another company

-Dave

On Saturday 11 November 2006 18:39, Charley Tiggs wrote:
> Which is the challenge.  Consider the following scenario:
>
> Client has retail customers that call in orders or place orders via
> their website.  They also have customers that are dealers who resell
> their products who place orders ahead of time, which the client call
> "wholesale" orders.  Sometimes, those wholesale orders are place several
> months in advance but client is instructed to ship these orders at a
> certain time.  The kicker is that some product can only be ordered one
> time (due to the process and materials involved in creating the
> product).  So, needless to say, a best guess forecast is made and the
> item is ordered in sufficient quantities to cover the forecast of those
> wholesale AND retail orders.
>
> So, a wholesale customer places a their order in June and requests that
> it ships to them in April of the following year.  Client orders
> inventory in August.  The product is received in January.  Retail
> customers can begin placing orders for the arrived product so there's a
> need to retain the requested amount for the wholesale customer until the
> requested ship date in April.  Is there no way to do this without
> creating an invoice and prematurely marking it as shipped?  After all,
> doing that in January means that the invoice will show as being in
> arrears when the product hasn't yet left the warehouse.
>
> Given the above, how can I protect the inventory already committed to
> the wholesale customers, particularly on product that, once it is gone,
> quantity can't be renewed?
>
> Charley
>
> Chris Travers wrote:
> > Items are deducted from the inventory when shipped.
> >
> > On 11/11/06, Charley Tiggs <..hidden..> wrote:
> >> Howdy gents!
> >>
> >> The client I'm working with has a model where sale orders are placed but
> >> payment is not necessarily verified at the time that the sale takes
> >> place.  It could be as many as three days before payment is verified.
> >> Once payment is verified, an invoice is created.
> >>
> >> For the client, this means that inventory needs to be committed at the
> >> time the sales order is created instead of waiting for the sales invoice
> >> to affect inventory.  Is this possible?
> >>
> >> Charley
>
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