The NetSuite Advanced Shipping feature separates out the billing and fulfilling aspects of your customer orders. Let’s take a look at how this feature works and how you can set it up in your NetSuite account.
Overview of NetSuite Advanced Shipping
First, what does the Advanced Shipping feature allow you to do in NetSuite? Without Advanced Shipping, you would fulfill and bill an order simultaneously in NetSuite. Advanced Shipping separates these functions so that your shipping department can fulfill an order before your accounting department bills the order.
Advanced Shipping also lets you manage more complex shipping and invoicing situations. For example, you can fulfill partial orders and invoice partial orders. You can also fulfill multiple orders at a time, as long as none of those orders have partial fulfillments.
How to Set Up NetSuite Advanced Shipping
Enable the Feature
Before you set up Advanced Shipping, you will need to enable the feature. You can find this feature on the Shipping & Receiving section of the Transactions tab in Enable Features.
Set Preferences
You may need to be able to invoice an order before part or all of the order have been fulfilled. In order to allow that, you will need to enable the preference Invoice in Advance of Fulfillment. This preference is located on the Order Management tab in Accounting Preferences.
Set Permissions
Any roles that are responsible for fulfilling orders will need to have a couple permissions added to them. While editing the appropriate role record, navigate to Permissions > Transactions and set the Item Fulfillment permission and the Fulfill Orders permission to Full. The Item Fulfillment permission adds the Fulfill button to Sales Orders, while the Fulfill Orders permission includes the menu options on the Fulfill Orders page.
NetSuite Advanced Shipping Processes
Let’s take a quick look at the two main Advanced Shipping processes: fulfilling a single order and fulfilling multiple orders.
Fulfilling a Single Order
To fulfill a single sales order when Advanced Shipping has been enabled, start by navigating to the Fulfill Orders page. For you, this might be housed under Shipping > Shipping > Fulfill Orders or Transactions > Order Management > Fulfill Orders, depending on whether or not you also use Advanced Billing.
On the Fulfill Orders page, you would use the top menu section to filter the list of orders that are shown by customer, transaction type, committed items, etc. Once you’ve narrowed down the list of results, you’ll select the Fulfill link under the Process column next to the exact order you wish to fulfill. This will bring you to the individual Item Fulfillment record for that order.
On the Item Fulfillment record, navigate to the Items tab and make sure the Fulfill checkbox is selected next to the items you are fulfilling. You can deselect any items that you are not prepared to fulfill and only fulfill some of the items on the order. You can also adjust the quantity of each item that you are fulfilling, allowing you to do a partial item fulfillment.
Once everything is complete for the Item Fulfillment record, Save the record. You could also choose the option to Save & Bill if you are planning to process the bill immediately. If you are not going to bill an order immediately, then at a later time you would do that by navigating to Transactions > Sales > Bill Sales Orders.
Fulfilling Multiple Orders
If you want to fulfill multiple orders at once, you can also do that from the bulk Fulfill Orders page. On that page, you would filter down the list of results using the top menu section. Then, select the Fulfill checkbox next to every order you wish to fulfill and then hit the Submit button. Of course, the only way to do a partial fulfillment of an order is to go into that Item Fulfillment record individually, but bulk fulfilling whole orders can save you a lot of time if you don’t need to customize how much of the order is being fulfilled.
Conclusion
The NetSuite Advanced Shipping feature gives you flexibility in fulfilling and billing your orders. If you enjoyed this blog, be sure to subscribe to our mailing list below to receive each week’s latest NetSuite blog post directly in your inbox.