Method Community

I'm wondering if there is a recommended strategy for closing sales order line items in Method.

I can see that Sales Orders have isFullyInvoiced and isManuallyClosed boolean fields to manage the open or closed status of an order, but we need to treat each Sales Order Line for a NonInventory part as a "Job" and maintain open or closed status at the Sales Order Line level.

I could create filters for schedules that compare the Quantity with the Invoiced Quantity and display Sales Order Lines that have an open Quantity to be Invoiced in combination with the isManually closed field, but over time we'll accumulate a lot of Sales Oder Line records and it feels a bit computationally inefficient for maintaining a schedule of open Sales Order Line items.

I suppose there are a lot of ways to do this using Where clauses and Filters, but I was curious if anyone has come up with a good strategy for this.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

James

Hi James,

jnoneiliv1:

but over time we'll accumulate a lot of Sales Oder Line records and it feels a bit computationally inefficient for maintaining a schedule of open Sales Order Line items

Are you only creating one sales order that you will use indefinitely? Or will each sales order just have many line items?

-Michael 

We'll have many sales orders and each sales order will have multiple items.  Each sales order may have one or several NonInventory Items of our principle make to order product, sand castings, from a tooling inventory of 1000's or as custom.  Each principle Item or casting may require additional line items for special services or billable lines like Surcharge, Packaging, Freight, etc.

We'll drive a production schedule as a list of Sales Order Line Items for just the NonInventory type Items.  The extra service items or billable add ons will only be visible in the Sales Order Detail.  It is this list, Grid, or report which potentially might have open or closed line items.

I can see how Quickbooks maintains a FullyInvoiced status on the Sales Order based on dollar values, which closes the order header, but this does not blow down to the Sales Order Line Items.

In my Grids and Reports, I could compare the Order Quantity to the Invoiced Quantity to filter out completed line items, or mark them all as ManuallyClosed, or create another boolean field in Sales Order Line Items that would automaticaly toggle to close when the Invoiced Quantity meets or exceeds the order quantity.

The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to create this AutoClosed field in Sales Order Line items.  In conjunction with isManuallyClosed it might give me full control.  But, this would not be an indexed field and every grid and report would require a filter to avoid displaying all the closed orders, potentially 1000's in a short time.

Okay, I think I have a solution.

QB maintains the field IsFullyInvoiced at the Sales Order Level.  By adding IsFullyInvoiced to the Sales Order Line Items table, the Sales Order Line will effectively Close when the Order is fully invoiced.

I think this might be the most elegant solution.  As we are using SalesOrderLineItems as Make to Order Items that can stand on their own as Work Orders that can be made and shipped it is not an explicit means of controlling the "open" or "closed" status of a line item, but this would only really become a problem with there were many orders with multiple line items spread out over a wide range of dates.  In practice, most line items will ship within weeks or at most a couple months of each other and the Sales Order should close out all line items over time.  The QTY Ordered versus Invoiced QTY's will make it clear enough the discrete status of each line item to be made, but using the automatic closing by FullyInvoiced will keep an Open Line Item report clean enough.

There is the added advantage that using IsFullyInvoiced to drive an open order schedule allows us to drop bread crumbs into orders for things we want to make sure get invoiced.  For example for billing for Prepaid and Add Freight.  By entering an amount for this line item, the Order will not fully close until the Freight is Invoiced or the Order changed making sure we do not forget to bill for freight.

Also, this technique of closing line items remains fully QB compatible as we are just essentially making a QB triggered status visible at the line item level in Grids and Reports.  This is preferable to using a line item status that would not be visible in QB.

Cheers,

James

James,

That is a pretty good solution and should work in your case.

-Michael

Thanks Michael. Knowing you don't see an obvious flaw or better solution really helps.  This is working well in testing.