Today we introduced the concept of Credit Notes. A Credit Note is simply a negative invoice. Unless activated on a customer group or a customer account, negative invoices are not possible.

To enable credit notes go to the customer account and enable the checkbox.

Without credit notes enabled, a negative invoice looks like this:

Notice that the only content on the invoice was negative, resulting in a Carry Forward transaction bringing the total to zero. When posting a negative invoice, a positive carry transaction is attached to the invoice and a detached negative carry transaction is added to the invoicee’s account. In effect, the carry forward is applied to future invoices.

There will be cases, however, where it is necessary to issue a credit note. Enabling the credit note results in this invoice:

Note that the title changes to Credit Note and the total can now be negative.

A new feature introduced today is the ability to construct invoices with specific transactions on them and nothing else. Normally an invoice contains all appropriate (reconciled, approved) transactions that haven’t been attached to a previous invoice.

Select Invoices are invoices that contain only Selected transactions. In Administration | Transactions you will be able to find transactions that can be selected. Note that selecting a transaction does not make it qualify for invoicing. This is simply a method to eliminate unwanted transactions from an invoice.

Begin by finding the transactions you wish to invoice. You can search by shipment number and tracking number. Check the transactions you want and click Select to mark them. A tick will appear beside the transaction number. The Unselect button reverses this.

Once you have selected the transactions you wish to invoice, go to Administration | Reconciliation | Invoicing where you can see the invoices ready to go out. Select the customer and click Preview Select Invoice to view what this invoice will look like. When you are ready use Post Select Invoice or File Select Invoice.

Excluding Selected Transactions

If you want to simply remove a transaction from an invoice you can follow these steps:

1. File a Select Invoice containing only the unwanted transactions
2. File the non-Select invoice (which won’t have the previously invoiced transactions)
3. Cancel the Select Invoice releasing the unwanted transactions for a future invoice

We now have two additional e-mail notification options for shipments. These are per-shipment options that result in an e-mail being sent to the shipper and/or consignee at the time the shipment is submitted to the carrier.

There are two types of notification covered here: Shipper and Consignee. Both messages are templates can be customised at the associate level.

The Shipper notification is intended to provide instructions for the shipping and will include all documents that need to be included with the shipment.

the Consignee notification is intended to provide the receiver of the shipment a link so they can track the shipment progress. The consignee will also be shown their address so it can be verified.

It is now possible to use a Reference field in Address Books. Any text can be placed into this field but ideally it should be a short unique code.

This field serves a special purpose in that if you search using text that matches the reference field of a contact then only that contact will be shown.

Saturday Delivery has now been implemented for FedEx and Purolator with other carriers in development. This option permits the Saturday Delivery surcharge to be added where possible.

Each carrier has differing restrictions for the service so verify that it applies by looking for the surcharge in the price breakdown and checking the estimated delivery day.

The waybills that are produced will clearly show the Saturday Delivery option.

It is now possible to include the Sold To and Broker addresses on Commercial Invoices.  Currently this is enabled on a per-user basis in the Home | My Account | My Preferences page.

Checking this option will allow the Sold To and Broker addresses to appear on the shipping page.

Note that these addresses only appear for international shipments.  Once the shipment has been submitted, the commercial invoice will include these additional addresses.

Note also that one must still check the Commercial Invoice checkbox prior to submitting the shipment.

Today the option to specify more precisely the location of a pickup has been introduced.  This feature is useful when the pickup location is unclear from the address, such as when the shipping address is a large warehouse complex.

Different couriers have different and competing mechanisms for specifying this data so the options available will change depending on which carrier the shipment was submitted to.

If you have ever wondered what your customers are doing, Analytics will be an interesting area for you.

We have added a button on the Customer list page labelled “Analytics”.  To use this feature select a customer and click on this button.

The page that appears is an assessment of customer activity since the customer account was created.

 

Development of the Analytics feature will continue and additional metrics will be added.  If there is a particular metric or analysis that you think would be helpful please let us know.

 

 

 

 

The Noviship system comprises a customer facing shipping interface as well as a financial back-office system for billing and reconciliation.  When a customer requests a quote and receives prices there are many processes involved in that calculation.  The cost of the shipment is calculated by rating with a specific carrier account while the price displayed to the customer is based on some agreed formula.  Later on an invoice can be created to charge that customer for the shipment, credited to the account holder.

Noviship provides two types of billing: Customer and Cost.

Cost billing provides a means for the account holder to charge the billing entity (the entity that manages the customer accounts) for shipments on their accounts.  Cost billing is always in the same currency as the shipment cost and the base price for each shipment is precisely the cost from the carrier.  Markups and service fees are charged separately to make reconciliation with carrier bills easier.

Customer billing is based on offers made to the customer account.  Offers set the markup or discount for each service offered by the carrier.  In addition customer billing can be in a different currency from the cost with currency markups applied.

The steps between knowing the cost and charging the customer have become more elaborate as the system has evolved and prior to the Reseller Model it was this:

In the above illustration the Partner charges the billing entity using Cost billing and and that entity charges the customer using Customer billing.

This model has changed to allow both a reseller and the customer to be billed (using Customer billing) for the same shipment.  The reseller is billed based on what they would have been charged for the shipment (i.e. using their offers).  In making this change we now call the billing entity the “Associate”.

In the above illustration there are now two Customer bills for a shipment.  Note that it is the Reseller that issues the Customer Invoice to the Customer.  More specifically, it is the Reseller’s logo and billing information that appears on the invoice.

The settings are configured in the customer account (Administration | Customers and use the Edit button).

An Identity is the combination of logo, name, contact details, tax numbers and so on visible to the customer.  A customer’s Identity appears on each page when they are logged in and generally represents their billing entity.  It is important to set a Reseller’s identity as this will be used on their customer invoices.

Invoices are issued the same way as they were prior to the Reseller model but now a separate invoice is issued to both the Reseller and the Customer.

Shipments are typically created by users logged in to the web site. However administrators can also import shipments from a courier EDI file and those shipments can be reconciled and billed through our financial system. However, given only a tracking number how can an administrator tell where the shipment data originated?

Today we added a column to the administrative shipment display (Administration | Shipments) visible to associates and above The column is named Source and it will show Website for shipments created by logged in users and EDI for imported shipments. Shipments created administratively (for example, to separate customs charges from freight charges) will be labelled Admin.