Centralized and decentralized order entry

If you want your sites to share customer order data, set up "centralized order entry" replication rules between the sites. This allows either of these types of order entry:

  • Centralized order entry, where the company’s ordering, A/R payments and/or pricing can be handled at a single site.
  • Decentralized order entry, where any site can originate its own orders.

An order’s shipment can span several sites: for example, lines 1-3 are shipped from Site A, and lines 4-6 are shipped from Site B. Shipping and invoicing tasks are performed at each shipping site.

When determining whether to implement centralized order entry, consider where Cost of Sales and Revenue are recognized. In centralized order entry, the shipping site incurs the cost and earns the revenue.

Be aware of these notes about multi-site customer orders:

  • Credit checking and inventory visibility are provided from site to site.
  • Invoice, credit, and debit memo sequences may be used to easily distinguish one site's A/R transactions from another. It is possible to create an open credit memo in one site, post it, and then reapply the credit memo to an invoice in another site. In order to prevent overlapping credit memo numbers from different sites, you should set up different credit memo sequences for different sites.
  • The Item Availability form can be used to check inventory levels across sites. It uses the Site Group ID.
  • Both the Shipping and Invoicing activities must take place in the "shipping" site. In a multi-site environment, invoicing is performed by each individual site. The originating site invoices only those line items shipping from its site. Other shipping sites will invoice locally for only their line items. In centralized order entry, if the originating site has no inventory, invoicing is done only by the shipping sites, not the originating site. However, if you have Invoice Builder replication set up between sites, users can create and post invoices at one site for items that are shipping from that site and other sites, through the Multi-Site Invoice Posting form.
  • A/R cash application can be done centrally, as long as the sharing sites have the same base currency. (In order to do centralized cash applications, A/R replication rules must be set up between the sites.)
  • A site can make a payment for an order that originated from another site that reports to the same entity, as long as the necessary data is being replicated between the sites. However, you cannot generate a new draft payment and apply it to multiple invoices, because when an invoice is generated for a draft customer, the system creates a draft record. There is a site-specific one-to-one relationship between an invoice and a draft.
  • To pull all default item prices for CO lines from the site originating the order, select Price from Originating Site on the Order Entry Parameters form. If this field is not selected, the system pulls the default prices from the site shipping the order line item.
  • Customer order cross-referencing (to purchase orders, jobs, etc.) can only be done for the local site.
  • You can use prefixes to ensure that orders are unique by site.

Using credit limits and credit hold in a multi-site environment

When you enter or change a credit limit in one site, the credit limit value is changed in all other sites replicating that data. The On Order Balance shown for the customer at each site is the cumulative balance of that customer’s orders at all replicating sites. For example, a customer has a credit limit of $100. Site 1 has one open order for the customer, for $50. Site 2 has one open order for $25. ("Open" in this case means Status=Ordered and nothing has shipped.) The customer’s record in the Customers form shows an On Order Balance of $75 in both sites. If you add a new CO Line Item for $35 in either site, the proposed On Order Balance would be $110. Even though each site fits under the credit limit, the line item is added as Status=Planned because the proposed On Order Balance has exceeded the credit limit.

In a multi-site environment, the Originating Site of a customer order controls the credit hold status of the customer order for all sites from which the customer order may be shipped.

When you initiate the Order Credit Hold Change Utility in a multi-site environment, the system performs the processing at all sites for the selected customers. The system checks the customer's credit limit against the On Order Balance to determine when the credit limit is exceeded. If a customer's credit limit is exceeded, what happens depends on the shipping site:

  • If the shipping site is the originating site of the customer order, the order is placed on credit hold.
  • If the shipping site is not the originating site of the customer order, a warning message displays, but the customer order is not placed on credit hold.

Payment hold for vendors

If payment hold is selected for a vendor in an environment where vendors are set up to be the same across sites, then payment hold is selected for that vendor in all sites.

Payment hold does not exist at the purchase order level.