OK where is your reseller in all of this?  If you go to the Help files and type in Serial Number, Distribution it will walk you through the process. If you have serial numbers on the items and you attempt to invoice it will not let you exist without distributing.

The reseller is worse than useless. Unfortunately, every time we change resellers, it gets only worse.

I think I see the problem. While I had in fact looked quite thoroughly in the help prior to your suggestion, I overlooked the item valuation issue, i.e. I have to change it to "serial" as appropriate for those goods. Without doing that, all of the Lot/Serial boxes are grayed out. I'm crossing my fingers that making this change to valuation will allow access to those tabs and the distribution grid.

I would suggest taking the Inventory class at SageU.

Beware that once you serialize an item you will be required to capture serial numbers on that item when you receive goods on a P/O. This didn't work for us at all. We only care about the serial numbers that we have sold so we can check it when a customer tries to return something. We ended up doing a customization so that we didn't get asked for serial numbers on receipt of goods, only during shipping.

Thank you. Yes, I discovered this after jumping through all the hoops necessary to turn on serialization. (Too bad that the HELP module couldn't consolidate this procedure into one place or that our reseller isn't more on the ball.) Fortunately I tested this on one obsolete item only before going any further.

This appears to be a pattern at Sage- implement a feature to the specs of (probably one major) customer's requirements, while ignoring the mainstream need. While I can see how useful it would be to track inventory and costing by serial number in a job shop or large manufactured product (i.e. a vehicle), the vast majority of distributors of goods simply need to capture the serial number against an invoice or credit document; there is no need for the complexity of inventory tracking or costing per serial. It would have been so easy to code for this typical circumstance first and then add on the other features as options with tick boxes in the setup page.

As one who has been writing code around business procedures since 1970, I am always stunned at how Sage overlooks the obvious, commonly used business procedures and instead designs for narrow scenarios that exist in only a few customer environments. Workarounds abound!

Don't even mention Sage's implementation of ODBC to me unless you want a further rant!

You could always use UDF's

Steve

MAS200 V4.4.8

That was one of my first thoughts, except that there is no way that I know (short of custom programming) to accept one serial number per quantity shipped. The "distribution grid" of Sage's serial entry is the bright point of their implementation.

We were fortunate that we were using Scanforce. We added a UDF in CI_Item to indicate whether an item was serialized or not. Then Scanforce made a customization (around $1000) which makes their software look at that UDF during shipping and ask for serial numbers as if the item was serialized according to MAS. Then I read the Scanforce text file with Access and update serial number history without all the costing info.

I'm not sure we could have gotten that customization done in MAS for that price. And the nice thing is that the standard serialization process still works if we code the Inventory appropriately in MAS.