Benefits of Using Packages
Fill purchase documents with ease
If your product card has package information attached to it, you can easily fill purchase invoices and orders. Instead of ordering by piece, you can order by package, and the module will fill out all other information automatically.
Wholesalers' ease of life
For wholesalers, it is much easier to sell package amounts, not product amounts.
Packages
Defining the packaging on the product card allows you to buy and sell products using packages.
By default, we have three types of packages.
If there isn’t one that suits your needs or you need to add more of them, then you can do it by going to Settings -> All Settings -> Package types.
To set up packages for a product, navigate to PIM -> Manage Product Catalog, select your product, and choose Packages on the left-side menu.
By selecting Add a Package, you can create it for the product. Required fields are Type and Amount.
Type - indicates the type of packaging
Amount - determines how many products one package contains
It is also possible to assign an EAN code to the packaging, with which you can identify the package in WMS.
If you go for example to prepare a purchase invoice for a product you can now choose to buy it with a package.
Packages in Documents
Packages are supported on:
- Purchase Orders;
- Purchase Invoices;
- Sales Documents (under the Inventory tab);
- Inventory Registrations;
- Inventory Transfers;
- Stock Replenishment Reports;
- Central Purchasing Reports;
- Inventory Reports.
In all those modules, defining a product's package sizes lets you pick the package from a drop-down list and enter the number of packages. Erply will automatically update the unit quantity field.
Packages are not activated by default on Inventory Registrations and Transfers, if you'd like that to be activated, please contact support.
It is also not automatically activated on Inventory Reports. To get packages listed in your Inventory Reports, please ask support to activate the following parameter: show_packages_in_inventory_report = 1
Note that Erply does not actually distinguish full packages and individual items in stock. There is no "pack/unpack" workflow. If you purchase three boxes of 20, open two of those and sell one item out of both, Erply will just know that the current on-hand quantity is now 58 — Erply does not know that there is one unopened box and two opened boxes.
Thus, the effect of the configuration parameter is just that Erply will just pick one package size for each product and show total current inventory divided by package size.
Features Not Supported Yet:
Scanning package codes.
The ability to enter/scan the code of the package, and have Erply Back office or point-of-sale automatically detect the product and pre-fill the quantity field has not been implemented yet.
The WMS app supports scanning of package codes when receiving/issuing existing documents in the main scan view:
- Products in
- Purchase order
- Products return
- Inventory transfer order
- 'In-transit' inventory transfers
- Products out
- Sales order
- Inventory transfer order
- Purchase return