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Dean Bachellier

Auto generate purchase order feature

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I've been having an on-going "discussion" with Sage about the auto-generate PO feature in BV small business edition.  I've taken the matter up with both Rick Davis (vice president, product strategy) and Siobhan Finders (Sage Business Vision Product Manager) .  Siobhan contacted the programming group.  I can't begin to express how dismal the response has been.

The "feature" as designed generates a purchase order that replenishes your inventory back up to the re-order point.  A completely circular and useless exercise.  The re-order point is the point where you need more.  It is the "trigger" for issuing a purchase order.  So why on earth would you want to simply replenish your stock to that point?  While I certainly have got agreement from Siobhan that this is a useless exercise and not even remotely helpful, what I've been told is that this is the way the program was written, and so long as it works as written, they don't see a problem.  It's also not on the radar to be fixed for at least two years, because nobody else has complained about it.

My argument is that the program isn't working as advertised.  Anyone with even a modicum of business knowledge (and I've been doing this my entire working life) knows that you base your purchasing on a minimum and a maximum;  your minimum is your re-order trigger, and your maximum is the quantity that you replenish up to.  Minimum order quantity is used to round up or down so you don't order partial packages.  This is business 101, yet their seems to be no desire to fix the problem.  Clearly the people at SAGE don't understand how small business runs, nor do they understand customer service.  You simply can't sell a product that doesn't work as advertised and then refuse to fix it.  

The "support team" did come up with a band aid work around that involved increasing the minimum order quantity to some artificially generated number (ie make my minimum order quantity more than my actual minimum order quantity), but when I ran simulations the results were incorrect.  The equation for determining the correct order quantity is very simple, and I have written a spreadsheet to deal with it, but that means exporting my inventory to the spread sheet, manipulating the numbers, and then manually entering the PO.  That sort of takes the "auto" out of auto-generate, don't you think.

Perhaps if they had spent a small fraction of their time fixing the problems with the program, rather than re-vamping the customer portal I wouldn't have this complaint.  Who are they trying to appeal to anyway?  Business owners or teenagers?  I really don't need blogs and tweets.  I need to run my business effectively, efficiently and deliver products that work properly to my customers.  That's how business is supposed to work.

Of course that's just the most egregious of the shortcomings with this system.  I'm really starting to consider going back to QuickBooks.  It wasn't perfect either, but at least their was some indication it was designed by business people rather than computer programmers.

I'd love to hear from other BV users who have tried to use this feature.

Dean

  • Hi Dean, I'm not sure how long you have been using BV but the reason no one complains about new features is that nothing ever gets done about it.

    Many of my clients were excited about the auto generate feature when it came out. After testing it in about 12 companies ALL of them said it was a useless piece of programming with no business intelligence at all so they gave up and I switched them to BV Essentials (an approved 3rd party BV developer) which is much more intuitive and actually lets you make the business decisions.

  • Hi Dean,

    I am looking for a reason as to why some of my products are not showing up on the Auto PO report.

    I saw your notes here and thought that I would show you the way that I use the feature, and maybe it would help with your situation.

    I have started using the Auto PO function about 3 years ago and it saves me hours of inputting. I have over 10,000 items to sort through when I do a PO, and the 'Re-Order by Vendor' report is what I have been using, and still do, but now I allow BV to input the PO for me.

    To answer your question .....

    "So why on earth would you want to simply replenish your stock to that (re-order) point?"

    It is because My Re-Order Point is the amount of stock that I want on the shelf. Some items I carry 1 piece, some 100 pieces.

    When inventory drops below my ROP, it now gets picked up by the 'Re-Order By Vendor' report, and the 'Auto PO' report, and in both reports tops it up to the ROP.

    I print to paper the 'Re-order by Vendor' report, which shows everything that has dropped below the ROP.

    I then quickly scan down the list and cross off the items that I do NOT want to order. For example, my ROP is 20 and I have 19, the report suggests that I order 1, I cross it off knowing that I don't need it. It also allows me to quickly see if there are any other products that I don't need.

    Then I 'print to screen' the 'Auto PO' report. With my 'Re-order by Vendor' report in front of me, I simply 'Un-Check' the items that I do not want to order from my 'Re-order by Vendor' report. This is very quick, even with a PO of 200 pieces. I then let the Auto report generate a PO and it automatically enters all of the products into a new PO for that vendor. That saves so much time rather than entering the items one-at-a-time.

    Now, with the new PO open on screen, I can manually adjust numbers into case lots where needed, which is still a lot quicker than entering all of the products manually.

    note:
    If you have previously set up a quantity amount (it could be a case qty. or just the amount that you usually want to order) in the 'Min.order qty.' for each item, then you can check the 'use min.order qty.to calculate requirements' AND the 'use ROP to calculate requirements' check boxes in the 'Auto PO report select from Inventory' drop down box. That should give you the Case Qty, or the min. amount that you would normally order as the 'suggested order' amount if the stock has dropped below the ROP. It will not order as multiple 'case lots' if the 'suggested order' amount is over the Min. order qty. for that item. So it will be necessary to scan your PO and adjust some quantities before you issue it, but still eliminate the need to enter every single item.

    There will be a short learning curve, but by allowing BV to Auto input the PO it sure saves me a lot of time.

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