Receive / Check In a split or partial shipment

dangardner4

Is there a good way to receive (check in) a partial shipment? My understanding is that a PO can only be "Finished" once. We very rarely receive a complete order from vendors in one shipment. The issue is our accounts payable will receive an invoice (data needs to be sent to Quickbooks) for each shipment.

roberto_pansera

Hi,

To ensure the proper synchronization of the purchase order with QB using Lightspeed Accounting as an integrator, you can "finished" the PO just once. If you have a partial received PO that you need the bill and is waiting to receive more items, you can finish it and duplicate it. 

On the duplicated one, you will be able to receive the remaining items and finish again to generate the bill on QB.

Regards,

Roberto

wkdearborn

After years of using Lightspeed, I have become a staunch advocate for a "one PO, one invoice" approach to orders that have multiple fulfillments. I've come up with standard formatting for PO notes, that allow me to see the life cycle of an order's fulfillment and track its associated breadcrumbs. The process essentially involves duplicating the PO immediately upon receipt of first fulfillment (if not completely shipped), removing backordered items from the duplicate and then using that list to remove fulfilled items from the original PO. I cross-reference the PO numbers, so I can always easily find my way back to the lineage. Happy to give you more detailed info on my process, if you're interested.

EDIT: It's helpful to think of Lightspeed's purchase orders as the accounting balance of a vendor's sales order, rather than as a kind of "master reference" that must always match what the buyer has submitted to the vendor.

Hampton

@wkdearborn If you pre-order 100 units and the order ships three times 70, 25, 5

How do you track fulfillment of an order?

gregarican

This is a significant functionality gap. For larger-scale businesses this simply isn't an efficient workaround. We could have a vendor order for seasonal merchandise. Typically these are ordered up to 6 months in advance and consist of 300-400 SKU's. And the vendor gradually ships us a batch of merchandise at a time. Until close to the target date we need to stock the items in the seasonal collection.

If we are to expect our backoffice fulfillment operators to keep duplicating PO's and keep removing items manually over the course of a few months then I'm not sure of how many of our natives wouldn't be restless. 🙄

This should somehow make its way onto a development roadmap. If Lightspeed is going to land larger-scale customers and occupy a more significant part of the retail software landscape this is definitely a defect. And yes, I realize that some of the manual workarounds could be shortcut via custom API apps or paying for third-party plug-ins. But when it comes to internal areas of the system apart of import/export types of integration it's a slippery slope.

TheUltimateDeckShop

There must be an update from LS on this major flaw, that EVERYONE seems to have an issue with?

AKADESIGNS

I have to agree with others above that this needs to be fixed. I’m only currently signed up in the Trial version and can see so many future issues!

With some of my current companies, I place one huge order for 2 seasons. $34,000 worth. I’m going to receive stock shipments as it becomes available, and charged accordingly per shipment. This means I could have 6+ shipments. I need a way to EASILY receive what arrives and leave back orders to be checked off in the future. Even having a check box next to items arrive, then be able to hit “received items” then add to inventory would make soooo much more sense!

lightspeed.... please do something... this is very frustrating!

(Even though I’m still on trial, I worked with the lightspeed program back in 2010 at a retail shop. So I have a basic understanding of the program. Some things have changed for the better and some appear to be way more frustrating!)

gregarican

@AKADESIGNS if you mention using Lightspeed back in 2010 I assume you are referring to the OnSite version. The Retail version is a different animal. Lightspeed acquired MerchantOS's cloud platform. There are a few quirks we've run into, devised workarounds, and changed business practices. Just for our most vanilla company it kinda works.

VanessaD

@here hey friends!

We have launched a public beta of an application called Market! If you'd like to know more, feel free to inquire with your Sales Rep.

Note: Market is currently only operational for the Bike industry, however it is being developed to include other business types as we move forward.

This feature will address the above issue by submitting the orders directly to your vendor with no middle-ware and once the items are shipped out, POs are automatically created in retail. (and if multiple shipments are sent, multiple POs are generated)

Feel free to consult the Introduction to the Market Beta help article for more!

robustobriar

So if i am understanding this correctly. I need either market or accounting then switch programs to quickbooks to have basic functionality back from the old system of lightspeed onsite?

This will either triple the time it takes me to accomplish the workflow we had OR double the cost.

I agree that this is a fatal flaw. I was told that this would not be an issue by the sales team.

Shootersshed

So I guess this is why there is not much change happening in Retail, because the whole company is working on new software.?

VanessaD

Hey @robustobriar ,

Currently, Market is free, so using this could be to your advantage since it helps create multiple POs depending on when your vendor sends out the products.

It is not a "new software" however, but simply an add-on to make the experience of partial receiving/ordering more streamlined within retail.

Hope this clarifies!

For more information on Market, feel free to consult this article!

robustobriar

Vanessa I am a retailer. Market seems to be built for suppliers. how does this apply? I am merely trying to achieve basic system functionality

dromanetti

LS Onsite handled this wonderfully. One purchase order. When you receive, you then click "invoice" and it created a vendor invoice that you would print labels from and also check against the actual vendor invoice. When you got another shipment, you went back to that purchase order, recevied more things and clicked "invoice" again. It created another invoice for everything that wasn't previously invoiced off the PO. There is no reason why Retail doesn't work like this other than the developers not looking at their own company or talking to actual businesses about their needs. As it is, LS Retail's purchase order system is nearly completely useless.

ngilson

I'll add yet ANOTHER request for partial shipment receiving that is better aligned with the functionality we enjoyed in OnSite

Hampton

When is this going to show up on a road map for the dev. team ?

VanessaD

hey @robustobriar

Market works for both the supplier and the retailer in the sense that when you place an order with your supplier, as they ship it out, the PO then gets generated with what was sent out, if this was a partial shipment, another PO will get automatically created when the remaining items ship.