Changing an order's status to Shipped starts several processes within Aptify, including:
- Reduces Inventory Levels: For products that have tracked inventory, Aptify moves the number of units that ship from the Quantity Reserved field to the Quantity Shipped field. Also, the system reduces the product's Quantity On Hand accordingly.
- Generates GL Entries: Aptify automatically generates the appropriate General Ledger (GL) entries when an order is shipped. See the Orders and GL Accounts section in the "Orders, Payments, and Scheduled Transactions" chapter of the Aptify Accounting & Financial Systems Integration Guide for details.
- Creates Scheduled Transaction Group: Aptify automatically creates a Scheduled Transaction Group, if necessary, to record deferred income GL transactions. See the Scheduled Transactions and GL Accounts section in the "Orders, Payments, and Scheduled Transactions" chapter of the Aptify Accounting & Financial Systems Integration Guide for details.
- Generates Subscription: If an order contains one or more subscription products, Aptify automatically generates the corresponding Subscriptions records when an order ships. See the Aptify Subscription & Membership Management Guide for more information.
Also, when an order's Order Status is saved as Shipped, Aptify prevents any changes to the financial integrity of the order and the following information can no longer be modified:
- Order Lines: A user can not add or remove order lines from the order. Also, a user cannot change an order line's price, quantity, or Ship To location. Note that prior to shipping the order, a user can specify a different inventory location for the item if different from the one displayed by default. The location can also be changed in the Partial Shipment dialog, see "Specifying an Inventory Location When -Shipping an Order" on page 171 for more information.
- Ship To Information: A user cannot modify the Ship To person, company, or address. However, when an order is shipped, the Billing Same As Shipping check box remains available to allow a user to modify the Bill To address or phone number as appropriate.
- Bill To Information: A user cannot modify the Bill To person or company. However, when an order is shipped, the Billing Same As Shipping check box remains available to allow a user to modify the Bill To address or phone number as appropriate.
- Taken By: A user cannot specify a different employee in this field.
- Organization: A user cannot modify the order's organization.
- Campaign: An order cannot be associated with or removed from a campaign once it has shipped.
- Order Status: Once set to Shipped, this field becomes read-only and can no longer be modified.
- Order Level: Once set to Shipped, this field becomes read-only and can no longer be modified.
- Date Shipped: If blank at the time the order shipped, Aptify automatically inserts the current date and time in this field. This field cannot be modified after the order has been saved as shipped.
- GL Entries: The Order Entry system generates the corresponding General Ledger (GL) entries for this order during the shipping process. Once an order has been saved as shipped, a user cannot modify the generated GL entries.
Automatically Shipping Orders
By default, when a user saves an order, Aptify determines if the order qualifies for automatic shipment. If the order qualifies, Aptify displays the message shown in Figure 4.1.
Auto-Ship Confirmation Message
Note that depending on how your administrator has configured your system, qualifying orders may ship automatically without displaying the confirmation message, or no orders may automatically ship. See "Orders Entity Attributes" on page 255 for details.
An order qualifies for automatic shipment if it meets the following criteria:
- None of the products specified on the orders lines require fulfillment. That is, none of the products on the order has the Requires Fulfillment box checked on its Products record's Inventory > General tab.
Product's Requires -Fulfillment Check Box
- For any product on the order that requires inventory, the product has sufficient inventory available to satisfy the order. Note that the inventory to satisfy the order must be located in a single Inventory Location that has the Allow Direct Fulfillment box checked. See the Inventory Management "Inventory Management" chapter in the Aptify Product Setup and Administration Guide for information on product inventory.
Manually Shipping an Entire Orders
When an order is entered and saved, the order status changes to Taken and inventory is reserved for the customer at a warehouse. When stock on the order items is physically verified and sent to the customer, the status of the order needs to be changed to Shipped. For orders containing goods that require shipment, Shipping and Receiving personnel typically set the order status to Shipped. For orders that do not require physical shipment (such as meeting registrations or membership), service representatives typically set the order status to Shipped after the order is confirmed (or the order can be shipped automatically, as described in "Automatically Shipping Orders" on page 165).
This section describes how to manually mark an order (or orders) as shipped using the following methods:
- Marking Orders As Shipped on an Orders Record: These steps assume the order has been shipped in its entirety using inventory from the default Inventory Location (if the order requires a physical shipment).
- Marking Orders As Shipped from a View: These steps assume the order has been shipped in its entirety using inventory from the default Inventory Location (if the order requires a physical shipment).
- Specifying an Inventory Location When -Shipping an Order: Follow these steps to specify the particular inventory locations from which the products on the order have shipped.
- Processing Drop Shipment Orders: Follow these steps if the order has been shipped -directly from a vendor or another third party to the customer. Drop shipped orders do not impact an organization's product inventory levels.
If only part of the order shipped, see "Partial Shipments and Back Orders" on page 187 for instructions.