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Evo-ERP and DBA Classic >> Sales >> Bill To vs Ship To addresses
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Message started by kkmfg on 09/29/09 at 06:23:51

Title: Bill To vs Ship To addresses
Post by kkmfg on 09/29/09 at 06:23:51

The sales people here are complaining about something. They don't like how one customer code cannot really store more than one address. We're a business that sells new and aftermarket parts for antique cars. As you might imagine, people buy this sort of thing to restore their cars. This is quite often not done by them. As such we do an awful lot of invoices with the "Bill To" and "Ship To" addresses being different. Sales orders of course support this but actual AR customer codes can only have one address. Sure, it's currently possible to use the ship to code field and have the restoration shop be a customer too but the sales people hate that. They think that it clutters up the AR list with all sorts of extra customer codes. Which it does. There are some instances where it would be good to do it the way it is now. For instance, a restoration shop / automotive repair center might work on more than one car that we sell parts for. But a lot of times people work on their car at their cousin Vinny's in Queens or Bolivian people fly to Miami to do business and want to smuggle parts back to Bolivia on their way back. ;) In such an instance we might want to ship to that location several times but only for that one customer. The sales people think it's a pain and cluttery to have to setup a new customer code for this. To some extent I agree with them. I'm pretty sure that most other ERP packages allow for multiple addresses associated with one customer. I imagine it's setup the way it is now to make it easy to associate multiple customers to the same ship to / etc but that's actually pretty rare that anyone would be using the same ship to as anyone else. In the few cases it happens I don't think we'd care if there are technically duplicates. It really would have been better all along to allow for multiple addresses for each customer and forget the silly ship to code business. Yes, I, Mr Database Normalization, do not want database normalization here.

Title: Re: Bill To vs Ship To addresses
Post by GasGiant on 09/29/09 at 07:07:46

kkmfg wrote:

Yes, I, Mr Database Normalization, do not want database normalization here.

You don't have to give up normalization for this. One table could hold all addresses, another table could hold the associations (cust id -> address id), and then the customer table having only the info that is one-to-one dependent on the cust id. That's perfectly normal, to the 4th form :)

Then for each customer you'd have a simple drop-down list of billing and shipping addresses, which could even be separate lists. That would require one more table. Truly, having several, purpose-designed tables is much preferable to having one huge, unmanageable gob that can't do what you want.

Title: Re: Bill To vs Ship To addresses
Post by kkmfg on 09/29/09 at 10:50:46

Good thinking! I was just voicing the complaint for our users and not really thinking about how it would really be done in the database.

Title: Re: Bill To vs Ship To addresses
Post by David Waldmann on 10/08/09 at 06:21:09

You are probably already aware of this feature and don't like how it works, but you didn't mention how it falls short, so...

You would still need to add the Repair Shop as a "customer", but you can restrict the "Ship To:" lookup to those customers identified with the Bill To. Of course, this means that if more than one customer uses the same RS the RS would have to be entered once for each customer.

SD-Q > Sales 1 > Limit Ship to based on Bill To.

Title: Re: Bill To vs Ship To addresses
Post by Vman on 10/08/09 at 08:28:51

kkmfg wrote:

I'm pretty sure that most other ERP packages allow for multiple addresses associated with one customer. I imagine it's setup the way it is now to make it easy to associate multiple customers to the same ship to / etc but that's actually pretty rare that anyone would be using the same ship to as anyone else.

My company has reps for its product line. In some instances, we bill the rep, but ship to the customer (for example, customer orders new equipment, and rep is doing the install). Later, the customer orders parts from us directly, so we bill and ship to the customer (seperate billing and shipping addresses). Right now, we manually enter ship to addresses in sales orders if the end customer does not have an account set up (i.e. a drop shipment from a reseller). I think seperate tables for bill to and ship to with associations would be much better that what EVO does now.