Method Community,
Please join me in pursuading the Method Integration team to add support for basic Bill of Lading (BOL) forms printing.
While I am thrilled to find a product like Method to fix that last 10% of functionality that Quickbooks leaves undone, and I am completely in agreement with both Intuit and Method Integration's focus on the 80/20 rule of application development, one area where I think both platforms are woefully deficient is in support of printing Bill of Lading (BOL) forms.
I haved talked to customer service at Method and was told that Bill of Ladings are industry specific forms and therefore support is strategically avoided by the Method platform, presumably supported through Custom Apps. While I think the Method platform would be an excellent (I haven't tried this yet...) platform to build our "custom" BOL, I think printing a BOL is so intrinsicaly tied to printing an Invoice or Packing List that it's ommission from support in Method (or Quickbooks for that matter) is a huge opportunity missed.
Both QB and Method offer Manufacturing(QB only) and Warehouse editions and since most warehouses exist primarily to receive and ship goods, having a minimally functional Bill of Lading form is necessary to even make the claim of supporting the business functions of warehousing, manufacturing, or shippping. It's just that last 10% that cripples an otherwise good solution.
The Bill of Lading is essentially just another report format of the Invoice or Packing list with a few additional fields. Namely, Handling Unit QTY, Handling Unit Type, Weight, Commodity Description, NMFC#, and Class. Everything else comes from the Invoice data or is boiler plate UCC legalese. Think of it as a special traveller version of the Invoice that instructs the carrier what to do. We've sold, made, and packaged the goods, now we need to ship them.
While it might appear that the Bill of Lading is a complicated form or different for each carrier or company, a standard Bill of Lading form has been defined by the VICS (Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions Association).
http://www.vics.org/guidelines/bol/
Think of the VICS as the W3C of the logistics world. It's not the best analogy, but it wasn't that long ago that standardizing browser display of html, css, etc. was a far off notion and really the BOL isn't that complicated when stripped of the standard UCC verbiage, which is mostly the same on all forms.
At first glance the BOL is very intimidating, but on closer inspection you'll find most forms have all the same information, just arranged differently. This is where VICS comes in, and they have considerable corporate participation.
For those you at Method who favor extreme programming, a BOL to support basic LTL shipments is really simple requiring very little additional data (none of which is posting or needs to be sync'd with QB), just a bunch of fields pre-filled from the Invoice and some additional fields. The VICS has already done the hard work and you can easily defer those pesky customization requests or functionality disputes by referring people to the VICS BOL guidelines. It's that simple, really.
Simple, but absolutely critical. It is quite maddening to have all this CRM software floating around, but if a customer asks me to make sure the carrier calls for an appointment delivery, I can't automatically print this on a BOL to make sure it gets done. QB and Method have us going back to sticky pad notes and sneaker net to accomplish this basic order fulfillment task (but did I mention all the cool CRM stuff we can do).
So, help stop the Small Business Software Madness and join me in pestering the good folks at Method to build a minimally sufficient BOL form. Or, share your solutions here in the community.
Cheers,
James