Category Archives: SOP

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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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

Item Qty Allocated, Oh But Actually Not…! – Issue & Fix

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This took my life past 2 days and yesterday I was so relieved to have to fixed.

Issue: For a specific set of Inventory Items, Item Stock information was showing up incorrectly. The Qty Allocated is showing some units, but the user swore on everything in this world that it’s not possible. Well he had a point to substantiate his argument. Upon drilling down from Qty Allocated in Item Qty/Site Maintenance (or Inquiry), nothing showed up.

Troubleshooting Steps:


1. First thing, I checked is whether any of these items had been used on a Service Call Parts Entry. If that’s the case, then Qty Allocated will be of that respective units, but it won’t be listed in the Allocated Documents list when we drill down. Result: NONE.

2. Ran a reconciliation on these items, hoping that it would clear any unnecessary Qty Information. Result: NONE.

Now that’s a real mess. Need some quirky way to find the cause & solution.

3. [CAUTION: Do not try this out unless you know what you are doing.] I took a backup of Live and restored it on Test. Then I updated the Quantity Information in IV00102 table manually based on User’s inputs. BUT, decided to run the reconcile since I was not sure about this manual update. Result: It reverted back whatever I had updated. And back to square one.

GREAT…!!! The above step at least confirmed that there IS A VALID DOCUMENT which is holding this quantity.

4. Queried SOP10200 (SOP Line Work) table to see the lines containing one of these items. There was one SOP Order, which was doubtful. Queried SOP10100 (SOP Header Work) for that Order. THAT’S IT… I FOUND IT…

Cause: The erroneous SOP Order had not been either posted or saved properly. The reason may be due a GP Application Hang which would have forced the user to kill the session. Once we kill the session when we are entering SOP Document, SOP10200 table will contain the records without any issues, but SOP10100 table would lose all the information that we had entered other than SOP Number, SOP Type and SOP Document ID. Not even Customer ID and Default Location.

These items had been allocated on this Order technically, but since the user would have killed the session, he thought he had to reenter the document and did so. Didn’t face this issue, till he ran out of stock.

Solution: I released this SOP Order for the user to retain/delete so it would release those Allocated Units from our Inventory. Check my article, SOP – “This document has been posted.” Error & Resolution, on how to release such SOP Documents.

VAIDY

Void OR Return? – Belinda’s Advise

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Belinda advises on what needs to be done when we want to reverse a wrong SOP Invoice. Read it here: Void an Invoice or enter a Return.

Now, let me add to that advise. As she has pointed out, if you have posted an SOP Invoice and if it involves an Inventory Item, it’s a thumb rule that we must pass a Return.

Return does the following:

1. Returns Inventory Items to our Stock.
2. Returns Serial / Lot Numbers for the respective Item as well.
3. Reduces also the Customer Receivables.
4. Passes a reverse GL.

So your Inventory is correct, Receivables is correct & is your GL.

VAIDY

Why Extender Information does not get transferred?

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I have been getting this query on WHY EXTENDER INFORMATION ON A SOP QUOTATION DOES NOT GET TRANSFERRED TO THE CORRESPONDING ORDER?
Well, there is obviously no logical reason behind it. Given the fact that SOP User Defined values are getting transferred from Quote to Order to Invoice, we expect the same thing from Extender Information also. Point substantiated.
But why Extender Information does not get transferred? There is a technical reason behind it. Extender Information is created based on the Key Fields that we are setting up in the Extender Window/Detailed Window definition form as shown below (COLOR BLUE BOX):
Most of the times, when a Consultant / End User create an Extender Information Window (or Detail Window) for an SOP Document, the Key Fields are typically “SOP Type” and “SOP Number”. When the user enters some information for an SOP Document, Extender saves this information in it’s table for the Key Value . For instance, if your SOP Document Type is Quotation, then SOP Type is 1. And if your SOP Document Number is STD-QT-123456, then the Extender Key Fields combination is:
STD-QT-1234561 {Last character “1” stands for SOP Type Quotation}.
When you convert this Quotation to an Order, a new SOP Document Number and SOP Document Type is created. For instance the above Quotation may get transferred to an Order of SOP Type 2 and SOP Document Number STD-OD-333333. Obviously for this SOP Order, the Extender Key Field combination would be:
STD-OD-3333332 {Last character “2” stands for SOP Type Order}
Extender does not understand the new Key Fields combination and it does not show up when you open that Extender Information Window (or Detail Window), as the information for the Quotation is for different Key Fields combination.
Hope the above explanation is clear.
Now, you may ask me another question: GP also does the same thing. Converts a Quotation to an Order with different SOP Type and SOP Number, but it still retains the SOP User Defined values. Why can’t Extender do the same thing?
For that query, I do not really have an answer both technically and logically.

But for now, that’s how Extender works.

UPDATE: You can’t really say that this is Extender’s drawback. Simply, Extender is a generic Addon for GP, which leverages the functionality. Having said that, Extender people cannot really write a specific code like what I explained above. Which does not make sense for developers to release a product with such process specific code. Moreover, Key Fields combination on SOP Documents can be anything along with SOP Type and SOP Number. Sometimes even without that. We really don’t know. Now, read the remaining part of this post.

For All Consultants out there: Be very clear on this point and design your solutions accordingly. Make sure that your Customers understand this point as well.
Let me not end this article on a negative remark.
Extender does give us a beautiful feature, which is Extender Inquiry. This makes sure that when you post a transaction which has an Extender Information, it is also shown when you inquire that transaction. And best part is that, you can either edit it even after posting or you can keep it Read-Only.
Nonetheless, Extender IS a very good tool for all Customers out there. It’s us Consultants, to decide on how effectively we are going to utilize it for Customers’ needs.
VAIDY