Receive / Check In a split or partial shipment
dangardner4
Member Posts: 2
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.
Answers
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
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.
@wkdearborn If you pre-order 100 units and the order ships three times 70, 25, 5
How do you track fulfillment of an order?
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.