Mike is a bit stressed. Sarah, the accountant, just e-mailed him announcing that the company has invoiced 6% less than usual while orders remained stable. Were these orders properly shipped? Mike is 100% sure that last month he shipped the regular quantity of goods. Well, he is the warehouse manager, he is in charge of shipping what customers order, but how can he know if these shipments have been properly invoiced? «Actually, that’s not my job.», he thinks. Sarah thinks exactly the same; she ensures that customers are invoiced but doesn’t have a clue which goods have been shipped or how.
Do they perhaps need a report that identifies the shipments not yet invoiced? How lucky they are: Openbravo ERP has a Shipment Awaiting Invoice report module.
Functionality
Shipments Awaiting Invoice report aims to answer the following business question: if we are receiving a regular quantity of orders for regular amounts, why are we collecting less money?
- Is there a problem with the shipments?
- Or are the goods correctly shipped, but these shipments are not properly invoiced?
Grouped by business partners and shipments, the Shipments Awaiting Invoice report will display in HTML or PDF format:
- The shipment line product,
- the ordered quantity,
- the shipped quantity,
- the quantity invoiced
- and the pending amount to be invoiced (as the pending quantity to be invoiced multiplied by the product price).
This data can be filtered by:
- Shipment date
- Business partner
- Order document number (the complete or partial sales order document number in our Openbravo ERP system).
- Shipment document number (the complete or partial goods shipment document number in our Openbravo ERP system).
- Delivery terms
- Form of Payment
- Payment Terms
- Organization
Technical design
Packaged in a module, this report is made of a manual filter window and a Jasper Report template.
This simple development was tackled component by component:
- Definition of the module,
- development of the Application Dictionary components,
- development of the filter and report user interfaces,
- development of the database query
- and development of the controller servlet.
You can find the technical documentation in the project’s Forge and the code versioned and publicly available in the Openbravo source code repositories.
Extension
Sarah and Mike do not really need all the filter fields:
- Sarah does not need to know about Shipments Document No. or Delivery Terms filter fields
- and Mike does not want to be confused by Form of Payment or Payment Terms.
In order to achieve these functional requirements:
- Two new reports will extend the original Shipments Awaiting Invoice report. We will call them, for instance, Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Accountants and Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Warehouse Managers.
- Accountant and Warehouse Manager roles will be granted access to the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Accountants report and to the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Warehouse Managers report respectively.
- The filter window of the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Accountants report will hide Shipments Document No. and Delivery Terms filter fields.
- The filter window of the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Warehouse Managers report will hide Form of Payment and Payment Terms filter fields.
Summary
Based on some business needs, we went through the functional and technical documentation of a simple report module, pointing to the relevant sections to develop it and presenting its extension possibilities.
Feel free to download and install the Shipments Awaiting Invoice report module. You are welcome to provide feedback in the project’s forum and log issues and feature requests in the issue tracker.
Mike and Sarah are now in a better mood: once the shipments that were not invoiced were identified, they could take action on them and the company is again following its regular income path.
Rafa Roda Palacios 