Management by Journal

You can manage stock through journals in the same way as you can manage your accounts through journals. This approach has the great advantage that you can define journals in various ways to meet your company’s needs.

For example, a large company may want to organize deliveries by department or warehouse. You can then create a journal and a manager for each department. The different users can work in a journal as a function of their position in the company. That enables you to better structure your information.

A company doing a lot of transport can organize its journals by delivery vehicle. The different delivery orders will then be assigned to a journal representing a particular vehicle. When the vehicle has left the company, you can confirm all the orders that are found in the journal all at the same time.

The different journals

Install the Reconfigure option Invoicing Journals for Sales Management or the sale_journal module to work with different journals. This adds three new concepts to OpenERP:

• Invoicing journals,
• Order journals,
• Delivery journals.

Invoicing journals (Sales ‣ Configuration ‣ Sales ‣ Invoice Types) are used to assign purchase orders and/or delivery orders to a given invoicing journal. Everything in the journal can be invoiced in one go, and you can control the amounts by journal. For example you can create the following journals: daily invoicing, end-of-week invoicing and monthly invoicing. It is also possible to show the invoicing journal by default in the partner form. Set the Invoicing Method to Grouped (one invoice per customer) or Non Grouped (individual invoices) according to your needs.

Order journals look like orders and are automatically transferred to orders for the corresponding items. These enable you to classify the orders in various ways, such as by department, by salesperson, or by type. Then if a salesperson looks at her own journals after an order she can easily see the work on current items compared with her own orders.

Tip

Default Values

To enter all the orders in their own order journal, a salesperson can use the default values that are entered in the fields when creating orders.

Finally the delivery journals are used to post each item into a delivery journal. For example you can create journals dated according to customer delivery dates (such as Monday’s deliveries, or afternoon deliveries) or these journals could represent the day’s work for delivery vehicles (such as truck1, truck2).

Using the journals

You will now see how to use the journals to organize your stock management in practice. After installing the module sale_journal look at the list of partners. In the tab Sales and Purchases on any of them you will now see the field Invoicing Method.

Partner Form in Invoicing Mode

You can create a new Invoicing Journal for a partner on the fly. You can show if the invoices should be grouped or not after you have generated them in the journal. Create a second invoicing journal End-of-Month Invoicing which you can assign to another partner.

Defining an Invoicing Journal

Then enter the data for some orders for these two partners. After entering these order data, the field Invoicing Mode is completed automatically from the partner settings. Put these orders into the Invoicing Mode based on items in the second tab.

Look at the History tab of the Sales order to the Picking List that has been created. The field Invoicing Mode is automatically shown there. Confirm the different orders in the list.

At the end of the day, the invoicing supervisor can display the list by journal. Go to the menu Sales ‣ Invoicing ‣ Lines to Invoice. Choose the invoicing journal and all the lists of orders to invoice will then open in list view. You can automatically carry out invoicing by clicking the action Make Invoice (the gears symbol in the application client).

Tip

Confirming Invoices

By default, invoices are generated in the draft state which enables you to modify them before sending them to the customer. But you can confirm all the invoices in one go by selecting them all from the list and selecting the action ‘Confirm Draft Invoices’.

At the end of the month the invoicing management does the same work but in the journal ‘month-end invoicing’.

You can also enter a journal to confirm / cancel all the orders in one go. Then you can do several quotations, assign them to a journal and confirm or cancel them at once.

View of an Order Journal