Category Archives: Sales Order Processing

Move Expired SOP Quotes To History – Leslie Vail

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Leslie Vail has posted an article at a time when I am currently working on closing down thousands and thousands of SOP quotes which users failed to close down. It’s about a SQL Script which moves all expired SOP quotes to history.

(Some really lame) reasons I use to hear for not closing down quotes:

1. We don’t know when that quote would be materialised.

Seriously? Gotta be kidding me. If it’s a quote of age 2+ years and you still don’t know whether it would get materialised or not, then something is wrong fundamentally.

2. If it’s voided, we won’t be able to copy the line items of that quote.

Wrong. You can. Copying line items from an SOP document is very much possible, even if it’s transferred or voided.

3. We don’t know whether the comments that we had added specific to that quote would be available for us to reuse it.

Answer is a positive YES. You can reuse the comments, because comments are NOT stored on that document but on Comments Master. Just select the ID and there it is. Unless, you have edited that comment on the document. But again, come on, it’d take 5 mins for you to inquire the voided one, copy the comment text and paste it on new one.

And so on…

VAIDY

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Infamous “Sales distribution amount is incorrect” Error

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I received an email from one of my users seeking my help in clearing this issue. While posting an invoice, this error message popped up:

SDE-01

 

Upon running the Edit List for this invoice, I realized that it was due to an imbalance in Markdown Amount and corresponding distribution line. Below was the error report that I got:

SDE-02

There seemed to be Markdown entered on one or more line item(s), but there was no distribution line for that amount. But the issue was not THAT simple and didn’t stop there.

When I ran thru’ all line items, none contained a Markdown. Now that’s the problem. After some minutes of thinking, I realized something must be stranded on header record’s Markdown field, for which GP requires a Markdown distribution line, but since line items do not contain any Markdown, it’s not creating one. Strange.

I decided to query the records from SOP10100 (SOP Header) and SOP10200 (SOP Line) to understand the issue. Below is what I found:

SDE-03

SERIOUSLY…?!?!?!?!

But yes, that was the issue. And most baffling thing is, when I tried to reconcile this sales document, this major mishap didn’t get cleared at all.

Obvious solution for this abnormal situation is as follows:

1. Take backup of this SOP10100 record.

2. Update Markdown fields with ZERO.

3. Reconcile this sales document again to see if the above update had caused any imbalance.

Happy new year and happy troubleshooting…!!!

VAIDY

Sales Quote Line Item Cancellation

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I recently took a training for users on GP SOP. Training was a success. There were couple of users who are already into GP for quite sometime now (4 years precisely).

Interestingly, when I was explaining about Quantity Quoted Vs. Quantity To Order Vs. Quantity Cancelled, one user said they had never used Quantity Cancelled at all to record any line item cancellation. That was quite a surprise to me.

Consider this scenario: A customer enquires about couple of products and we prepare a quote and send it to them. Out of two products, they confirm only one and we are to transfer this quote with only product. There are three ways we can adapt:

1. Delete that unwanted product line on the quote and transfer this quote to an order (Bad Approach).
2. Transfer the quote in totality and from Sales Order delete that unwanted product line. (Bad Approach).

Above two approaches do not give us the fair picture on quote conversion. Considering the fact that GP SOP do not maintain a revision history of each document, it’s not advisable to follow above steps.

3. Cancel the quantity, by removing “Quantity To Order” and entering “Quantity Cancelled”. Transferring this quote will not transfer unwanted product to Sales Order.

By doing this you are retaining originally quoted products list and transferring only those which your customer wanted, also for your self-assessment on how you have performed in winning the quotations. Most recommended approach.

Of course, we would be forced to add/remove product lines from Sales Order for some reasons. But at least, quote conversion would give us facts at the time when we won the quote for that particular customer.

UPDATE: Siva has written a post which expands my post into different modules and how we can maintain records for better and painless auditing.

VAIDY

Sales Document Copy Feature

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Consider this scenario: You have a sales quotation with nearly 100 line items prepared for a customer/prospect. Another customer/prospect inquires about same set of items. Are you going to enter that 100 line items again on the new quotation? If your answer is YES, then you are seriously wasting time.

Sales Document Copy feature is a boon for those who deal with sales documents with more than 25 line items (or even 10 that matters) on a daily basis. Below is the Sales Document Copy window:

This is not a new feature and is existing for long time now. So I am not going to explain anything new obviously.
I just thought, for those who have not used this feature or not knowing about it till now, it’s a great one to be availed.
Just make sure that you read all options out there and select only relevant options for you. For instance, you may not want to *Copy Markdowns* from source document to target document. You may have given a discount to previous customer which you may not want to expose it to new customer.
Trust me, this feature saves immense data entry time and eases out sales document preparation.
VAIDY