I recently contacted Sage support over the phone about this but was directed here. Here is a breakdown of my issue/question.

Our business used to bypass the shipping section of the sales order module by sending a packing list to the floor, having a picker/packer use that to write on what was packed into each box, and then that was brought back to our sales department for manual data entry back directly into invoice data entry. When doing this we were not retaining packaging information or tracking info in Sage. We'd like to fix that, so we are going to start using shipping data entry. This is also being driven by the fact that we are implementing scanners into our warehouse and they integrate with shipping data entry, so this is required.

In using shipping data entry we have run into an issue with miscellaneous items on the sales orders. When selling these items (not physical items), shipping data entry is REQUIRING that we put them into a package... Obviously this isn't ideal. We'd like them to not need to be packaged, but to still be able to remain on the invoice. Please note, adding them onto the invoice manually after the shipping process is complete isn't a good option for us... This would be extremely error prone and definitely not any better than our current process which we are trying to improve.

An example of this is where we sell access to a specific website with sensitive information on it that shouldn't otherwise be available to the public. This brings up a side note here... Are we handling this wrong in the first place? We are currently treating this website account as an item in inventory because we need to track quantity and time of people purchasing access. Its a standard inventoried item as of now with no stock quantity, and we just allow it to go negative on hand as they sell. This may not be ideal, but it hasn't been causing us any issues. I believe it was even recommended to us to handle it this way in the past, but I'm not sure where that recommendation came from exactly. We contemplated using a /misc item code for this instead to alleviate the negative inventory thing, but it doesn't seem to matter for us with this shipping data entry issue. Even if its a /misc line item on the sales order it seems that the module still requires it to be packaged if its shipped... And if it isn't shipped, its not populated on the invoice...

So we are at a bit of a stand still here... Any advice? We don't want these miscellaneous things to have to be packaged, but they have to be on the sales order under our current process. If there is a better idea of how to handle this situation up front I'm all ears!