Hello All,
Anny comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Background:
We offer a trial program where potential customers can try a printer out and then decide to keep it and pay for it or send it back. We process a sales order to ship the trial unit and this generates a trial invoice showing the list price of the printer. The trial printer only comes with trial consumables that don't last very long so when most customers decide to keep and pay for their trial unit they often include new consumables on the same PO.
Our Current Procedure:
When we receive a PO to keep the trial printer and purchase new consumables we have been applying a credit memo to return that printer back into our system and cancel the trial invoice to zero. We then generate a new sales order and line one is the printer they are keeping. Below that we type in a comment on the sales order that says "Above Printer Kept From Trial, Only Ship Below Items" which signals our shipping department not to include a new printer on that shipment. After that comment we enter in all the consumables the customer is purchasing. The cost of the printer is often discounted slightly depending on how many consumables they buy at the same time they pay for the printer.
This results in having one "no-ship" item and multiple "ship" items on the same sales order. We do this so we can have a single invoice in our system to match a single PO from the customer. I am wondering if other companies doing something similar are sending two invoices to apply against the customers one PO? I have a feeling that there must be a better way to handle this. Does it make sense in this scenario to combine a standard sale and a trial purchase on the same invoice? Is there some built in Trial functionality in MAS that we're missing?
What is the best practice in regards to processing a single PO for a customer purchasing a trial unit in their possession and ordering new items that need to be shipped?
