Customer consignment stock management

SOLVED

Hi all,

we are using X3 V12 and for selected customers we do keep consignment stocks. Work flow is as following:

1.) We sell certain products (full pallets) to these customers (fully invoiced) out of our normal stock.

2.) These sold articles are being kept in our warehouse (ownership has been transferred to customer, though). 

3.) Customer "calls" his stock over time which is then being shipped to different destinations (end customers of his). These shipments are not being invoiced again (bc they were already before). We charge customers only handling and storage fees.

Question: How can we handle these movements within Sage? We have created customer storages for these customers but we cannot create allocated stock movements outbound. When creating deliveries we never can chose as type "customer storage" to pull the articles out of the respected customer stocks. 

No we have to move stocks manually forth and back between internal storage types and customer storages before we can create movements. Problem: laborious and we can only use delivery notes which then are pending to be invoiced (which we don´t need nor want).  

What would be the best solution for this workflow? Is it manageable within Sage or do we have to solve it via manual tracking?

Thanks in advance

Marcus

  • +1
    verified answer

    Wild guess.

    I don't understand "We have created customer storages" because that is kind of where i'm going with this.   Except not customer storage but regular sites for storage.  

    Set up sites and associate the customer with the site as you would an inter-site shipment/customer.   The bill to is the real customer.  Sell intersite but bill to the customer.   You will have to set up inter-site pricing probably.    You need to figure a way to get the cost of goods off your books because it's still yours under this scenario.  So you can do a custom journal entry for transactions to this customer to move it to a special account that is 100% offset and so zero.

    Maybe something like that?  

  • 0 in reply to Stephen

    Hi, thanks a lot for this answer. Highly appreciated. 

    Indeed, meanwhile we have gone this way and set up a second site (warehouse only) and created a warehouse under this new site associated to a specific customer.

    Workflow looks as following:

    1) Customer orders his goods to be stored in "his" warehouse.

    2) We bill customer for the goods sold. Sale is done without goods movement (just value). 

    3) We then initiate an inter-site transaction of the sold goods to the warehouse related to this customer at the new site (it´s set up as standard warehouse type - not "customer warehouse type". This transaction is being carried out without pricing (cost of goods does not change). 

    Caveat: yes, for Sage we still own the goods (which we don´t  in reality). We cannot get them out of the books this way. 

    You are proposing a custom journal entry for transactions. Would be great if you could explain this procedure to me.

    Thanks in advance!

    Marcus

  • 0 in reply to Marcus Roscher

    Hi Gentlemen,
    I have an idea that I have not tested. So excuse me, if this is totally inadequate.
    Here is the principle:
    1/ The sales flow is a classical one (maybe with a dedicated sales order type to identify the consignement sales): sales order > delivery > sales invoices. Normally your GL is correct but of course you are missing the stock.
    2/ Process a customer return on a dedicated consignment stock site (attached to the same company than the sales). If, you ensure to have no auto journal, this transaction won't be posted. Hence the stock is not in your GL and not in your stock available. The trick would be to ensure there are no credit note upon the return.
    3/ New delivery will be done to deliver the end-customer with the actual address. This record would allow to print the delivery notes and everything you need for the transportation.

    The benefit compare to your actual solution would be to have the delivery linked to the invoice process so the COGS are correct and in case of actual customer return you would be able to manage a credit note against the delivery.

    What do you think?

    You can even simplify the step 1 by just having a customer invoice with stock movement (and no delivery).

    If this is the right direction, you can also consider doing a customization that will create automatically the customer return from the delivery type 'consignement'. Of course, there is a need for a budget to do that. But if you have a significant volume of transactions it would be interesting.

  • 0 in reply to Julien Patureau

    Thanks a lot for your thoughts and proposal. I have to digest it and run through on a test site. It looks quite out of the box but may solve the problem not being able to get the sold goods out of our books at the moment they are billed to the actual customer. 

    appreciate your help!

    Marcus

  • 0 in reply to Marcus Roscher

    Julien is on track with my thinking.  Of course i have not tried any of this.  

    >>Would be great if you could explain this procedure to me.

    I would have to work through this but what i'm thinking is to set up an auto-journal for this transaction that would in effect zero it out and take it off the books.    Then you'd need another journal entry when you shipped that offset to these same accounts.   Theoretically the on-hand inventory value at that site would equal the value of the offset account so there is no balance sheet affect but you can track it.