automating landed cost allocation

[reua...@gmail.com]

Hello Community,

I was thinking about an improved way to allocate landed cost invoices.
We are already using a process to generate transport orders from our purchase orders. 
I could now easily add another step to that process to add the transport order value to the estimated landed cost of the purchase order that the transport order was derived from. 
Thinking a little bit further I got the idea to also store a reference to the transport order itself with the landed cost record. 
This way it should be possible to automatically store the actual landed cost with the correct vendor product invoice when the transport invoice is generated from the transport order using the information stored in the database when the transport order was generated. 
Has anybody done something along the lines already? 

WDYT?

Thanks for any helpful hints and comments.

Andreas

[Steven Sackett]

Hi Andreas,

We did something similar but not applied in idempiere. If you are interested we did the following. 

Created a "Shipment Plan" which had multiple lines to pre-calculate each type of cost that would be incurred in shipping/delivering from the source country/warehouse to our country/warehouse (typically 5 to 10 separate items of cost). Each cost could be allocated on a different allocation method such as weight, volume,volumetric weight, cost per unit, percentage of product cost, marine insurance costs  etc, 

Import Duty tables were added and applied automatically in a PO which included an m_product subject to duty.
A PO would have a Shipment Plan selected on the PO top tab. When 'prepared' it would calculate each of the expected costs of receiving the product(s) on the PO based on duty and weight/volume stored in the m_product..

Later a Material Receipt would be created which would automatically create a C_Activity which we had renamed as 'Import Activity' and add it to the MR.

The posting of the MR would debit product cost, credit 'goods received not invoiced', credit (one or multiple) 'accrued landing costs' account(s) ... the landing costs would be calculated based on evaluating all the lines in the Shipment Plan. The 'Product Cost' would be created to include all the landed cost items (as were using batch level costing).

As actual landing cost invoices were received the invoices would be posted to the accrued landing costs accounts and linked to the MR's Import Activity.

When all costs were known to be posted, a report could be run for the selected 'Import Activity' and the output of the report would automatically create a journal entry and move the difference between the pre-estimated landing costs in the MR and the actual landing cost invoices to Invoice Price Variance.

The system was used to import motor vehicles and motor vehicle parts.  About 50% of parts were ordered for immediate delivery by airfreight.  As soon as the parts arrived they would be cross-docked and shipped out to fix broken cars.  The customer wanted the landed costs taken up when the MR was posted so that the immediate sale of the parts could be costed to COGS with a good approximation of the landed cost rather than trying to get all the landed cost invoices posted before the Customer Shipment could happen.

If the above is of any interest to you I can provide some user documentation which describes the process more clearly. The code is gplv2 if of any use.

regards

Steven 

[reua...@gmail.com]

Thanks Steven,

that sounds very interesting and I would definitely be interested in learning more about your solution. We do have an order process for some of the cost factors that will be implemented a bit differently since  cost amounts will be taken directly from the transport order. For those factors where no order is generated something along the lines of your solution would come in handy. 
Also please let me know under what conditions you'd be prepared to share your code. 

best regards

Andreas

[Steven Sackett]

Hi Andreas, 

i can not find documentation only on this function. I will attach a docum,ent that covers more than is relevant and suggest you look at sectiuons 3.1.1  3.2    4.2.6  section 5 and section 6.

We are happy to share the code under GPLv2 terms ... it may take a bit of time to extract the relevant bits and make public.  If you are interested pls let me know.

regards

Steven  

[reua...@gmail.com]

Thanks Steven for the manual.

 Although our use case is quite different it gave me some great ideas on how to design the implementation and that was super helpful. I will surely pick up the idea of using shipment plans to generate commonly used shipment schedules. Also the plans can be a gresat tool for matching transport orders with transport shipments. This will save us from having to allocate the same cost twice (first to the order then again to the invoice)
BTW: I really love the Adaxa manuals. When I started using iDempiere a few years ago I found your Adempiere specific manuals to be among the most valuable resources to learn from. 

Andreas