What are Dispatch and Supply dates?

Supply dates on orders impact the invoicing of orders within the system both with what date will be used on the customer's invoice and the organisation of the criteria within the Approve sales orders for invoicing page. It can, therefore, determine the month an order will fall into when processing invoices through the system. The two main dates related to orders are Dispatch date and Supply Date. Before configuring the system we first need to understand what these dates are:

Dispatch Date - When you dispatch a sale on the system, your Dispatch Date is the date when you physically clicked the button to tell the system the order is being removed from stock. When you dispatch an order the stock is removed from the physical amount against any stock controlled product on your order and the stock value of the product is reduced.

Supply Date - This date is when you supply the products to your customer. Depending on your business model and internal processes, this date could be in the future from the dispatch date or the same day. The Supply Date can be adjusted throughout the pre-invoice lifecycle of the order. It's worth pointing out that if a Supply Date is manually changed, the system locks the date to prevent unwanted adjustments. This is an important note, because the configuration of the system can be set to ignore locked dates when automatically adjusting the Supply Date.

System Configuration

To access the options for Supply Date configuration your Prime user will need to navigate to the following location within the system:

Settings > Organisation Settings > Ledger Settings > Ledger Options (Tab) > Order (Tab)

If you then scroll down the page and look for the below section:

The above screenshot shows the default settings for the configuration.

The configuration is broken down into 3 main sections: 

• When dispatching sales orders
• When supplying sales orders 
• Allow future supply dates (after supply)

Within the first two sections there are two dropdown boxes. One to determine how to modify the Supply Date and one to determine whether the system will override manually locked supply dates or just amend system calculated Supply Dates.

The available options within the Modify Supply Date dropdown are as follows:

• Leave supply date as set - This option will tell the system to not adjust the supply date when processing the order.
• Move supply dates in the past to today - This option will adjust the Supply date, dated before today, to today's date. It will not touch a Supply Date that is set as today or beyond.
• Move future supply dates to today - This option will adjust the Supply date, dated beyond today, to today's date. It will not touch a Supply Date that is set as today or before.
• Set supply date to today - This option will take the supply date and set it to today's date regardless of it's timeframe.

The last section within the configuration is Allow future supply dates (after supply). If this is set to Yes, when supplying an order with a future date, the system will allow you to do this. This means you can invoice beyond the current date. If it is set to No then the system will automatically move the Supply Date to today's date, regardless of all other settings.

Examples

• The below screenshot shows a configuration where at the point of Dispatch, the Supply Date will not be touched and this is for all orders, regardless of whether or not the Supply Date is locked or Calculated. At the point of Supply, however, any Supply Date that is not locked and is before today's date (in the past) it will move it to today's date. If there is a calculated or locked future date, the system will allow this to progress without moving the date back to today, due to the fact that Allow future supplied dates is set to Yes.

• The below screenshot shows settings where any calculated Supply date will be changed to today's date, regardless of the date that is set. This means if a locked date is in the past or future it will not move, however, Allow future supplied dates is set to No. This means when the order is supplied, any future date will be brought back to today's date, regardless of whether it is locked or calculated. Ultimately this means any locked Supply date that is before today, will remain. Any other date will be changed to today's date once the order hits Supplied.

Additional System Changes

There have been some further adjustments made to the system to accommodate the different dates. These changes are detailed below:

• The Approve sales orders for invoicing screen now includes Supplied by as a date filter and Supplied Date as part of the data grid. This means if you have an order that was physically dispatched at the end of one month, but you do not want include it in this month's invoice batch, setting the Supply Date to next month will allow to better filter this screen to create an invoice batch. The opposite is also true when you wish to include an invoice in the previous month when dispatching in the new month.

• The Approved to issue screen also has Supplied By as a data filter and Supplied Date as part of the data grid. The screen also includes the setting for the Invoice Date basis.

What is Invoice Date Basis?

A prime user can navigate to Settings > Organisation Settings > Ledger Settings > Invoicing 
The below option will be shown and this will inform you how the system determines your sales order invoice date:

 

If you have any questions regarding the configuration of the Supply Date settings, please feel free to contact the support department by emailing support@ten-25.co.uk