How can I batch bill orders in Macola? Manifest select?

[joybee36]

I am "dumping" hundreds of orders into Macola daily, and am currently having to bill them each separately in order to invoice them. I thought that I could turn on the Manifest option in System Manager and use that instead of billing them individually, even though I'm not using clippership or shipgear. I called the support peeps over there, and they said that I had to pay to register that option. Any other ideas? Thanks!

 

[MacolaHelp]

The short answer is that it can be done without purchasing starship, shipgear, etc. You set a switch in the macola setup ini file & company setup for manifest. You would need to create your own arshtfil with the necessary information in it to allow macola to know that you had manifest table entries. This is the file starship writes to that holds tracking info, shipment cost, order number. Once the information is in the file correctly, the normal macola processing would take over again to post everything where it needs to go.

Now, building that file requires some solid table knowledge and understanding of how to test the validity of the data you are attempting to upload. If this is your first attempt, I suggest you engage one of the macola techies here to write it, help you write it, or work with someone who would document the work and maintain it as needed.

 

[abaldwin]

I would just further suggest that you create and THOUROUGHLY test this in a test company which would be a copy of your live data company.

Test it a lot before moving it to the live data.



Andy Baldwin

"Testing is the most overlooked programming language on the books!

 

[MacolaHelp]

Absolutely, as Andy says. The testing should not be limited to the obvious, either. You also need to be sure that the shipment info is visible in the OE views & history views after invoices are posted, that the tracking info appears on the forms, etc.

You also have to deal with qty to ship line items < qty ordered items. And, if you multibin soft allocate, lot or serialize inventory, you have a whole other can of worms.