Types of Warehouses

The following types of warehouse can be defined for the inventoried products subsystem:

·            Third party
Not a shipping warehouse (zero priority).Typically, it is the storage warehouse of the publisher/manufacturer. Tracking the stock in a third party warehouse will give the inventory manager an overview of their total stock; when shipments from this warehouse come into the regular, shipping warehouse, the transfer function will be used.

·            Consignment
Process is that organization ships a quantity of product to the consignment warehouse. Consignment warehouse sends report to organization about the number of products that have been sold. Organization enters order for quantity of product that has been sold by the consignment vendor (bill-to/ship-to would be the consignment warehouse e.g., Amazon), manually changing the warehouse. Manually changing the warehouse means that the system will not reassign the warehouse, even if the order is backordered. This cannot be a priority zero warehouse and should have a higher priority number than any other shipping warehouse for the product because if warehouse one runs out, it will start pulling from this warehouse and that is bad!

·            Regular
Will have a priority of 1. It will receive its initial inventory to process all orders.

·            Storage
Warehouse priority of zero means that the warehouse is used for storage only. No orders are fulfilled from a priority 0 warehouse.

·            Point of Sales (POS)
The purpose of a point of sale warehouse is to allow your association to move inventory to a book store at a trade show in a different state than their headquarters and a different state than they are formally registered in. For example, the system would act as the local cash register. This all plays into calculation of sales tax.

Your association may be responsible for charging sales tax for something sold in its state and in a state of the ship-to customer. Normally, you may not have to charge sales tax for another state unless you are specifically doing business in that state.

Products in point-of-sale (POS) warehouses can only be purchased if a POS batch is open. Thus, the user can define inventory in his/her point of sale warehouse and open a point-of-sale batch. These two functions work together in order to charge the correct sales tax for sales at the meeting and to default the warehouse for its inventory to what it has on-site rather than the standard processing of choosing warehouse by priority.

When a POS batch is open, the system automatically sets the order line status to “P” (pre-shipped) and the POS warehouse inventory is updated. If a customer wishes to have the product shipped, the user can select a different warehouse.

If inventory is depleted at the point-of-sale location, the system will first attempt to find a different warehouse from where the order can be filled. If the POS warehouse is not used in the order line, the system reverts to regular rules for calculating tax, which is usually based on the ship-to address of the customer.

See also:

·            Warehouses for Inventoried Products

·            Creating a New Product Warehouse