Meaning:
- We are multi-site
- We are not multi-company
- We hate transfer orders (don’t worry; I will rant later)
- Couldn’t we just do POs and sales orders? (Not ICPOs; just normal ones)
- Any disadvantages?
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Same here - we hate how it seems like it’s a half-complete system.
I think if you set up your GL controls on the AP and AR side correctly, the financials will flow correctly as far as “revenue” and “cost” on each side.
You will still need to process AP and AR invoices, payments, and cash receipts on either side to finish the billing process. I think that’s the major disadvantage with this.
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Continuing on the payments thought, I’m not sure if you guys use Bank Statement Processing to reconcile your bank each month but Epicor would expect to see withdrawals and deposits to line up with those payments/receipts. You would most likely need to create fake bank transactions to clear those in Epicor.
I’ve mulled this option for years now. Honestly I wish I had asked in 2020 before we even went multi-site.
Things I hate about transfer orders:
- Like, everything. I barely know where to begin.
- You can’t undo a receipt
- You can’t make-direct-to-transfer
a. So, you can manually make a job that gets received across sites, but it is very fragile. And it creates its own pack slip, which confuses people to no end. - Partial receipts are barely possible, and when you do, they leave the order open yet it is NOT in the populated list in the receiving screen.
- What’s the thing where you have to enter line by line - shipments, maybe?
- Minor, but you have to be in that site to see its transfer orders, etc. (Whereas sales orders and POs are open to all sites in a company.)
- Accounting is painful
- Back-tracking from a receipt to an order is miserable. I’ve made several BAQs to tackle this.
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Absolutely. 2x or 4x or 6x the work.
And yet… I still feel like it’s worth it.
It’s so much cleaner if it falls inside the norm of Sales → PO
EDIT:
Hmm. I have to think on that. We do use Bank Rec. Is there an AP Write-off just like the AR write-off? Regardless, it may still make more sense to run through the process anyway. As an example, cash receipt can be done in bulk while AR write-off cannot.
Summarized well. We do a fair amount of them (HQ to two remote sites) and they’ve been problematic. Above and beyond what you mentioned, there were a few bugs that got us in our first quarter of live use…receipts complete but PartTran records missing, or a PartTran record existing for a transfer line that somehow did not exist.
That being said - going to a regular SO/PO setup seems like it’d require far more work/time to complete…guess it’d depend on the volume of transfers you do.
I don’t see how you can do so/po between sites though. You would have to reimplement as separate companies. Is that what you are planning to do? Seems like a lot of work.
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Oh yes. Also bugs here. But of course none so predictable that we could prevent them or report them.
No definitely not reimplement.
I’ve honestly not tried it in practice, but I can’t see what would stop you from doing it within one company. Please elaborate what you are envisioning as a problem - I really do want to know.
Not a ton. I just did a quick pivot, and it’s about 100/month.
EDIT: Well, 180/month on average this year. Hmm…
How can a site be a customer on a sales order or a vendor on a purchase order?
I mean, you just make one for each…
It’s what you do for intercompany, right?
Yeah but when its intercompany, that company actually exists. How can you enter a po. And then turn around and enter that same po as a so in the same company?
I am missing something.
If I make a PO to Amazon, Epicor does not care if Amazon exists as a real company. It’s just a vendor. We could be lying, but it still processes just the same.
If the accounting for this is weird, then just manipulate it with GL controls and intercompany bank accounts, no?
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I can’t really see how it would work but I am not an accountant. In your hypothetical, you would also need to turn around and enter that po as a sales order, as if you were amazon.
Right. Double the work.
ICPOs are double the paperwork, too, but I think there exists a mechanism in intercompany setup to create the ICPO from the sales order or v.v.
In my scenario, there is no mechanism. Either a person has to do it, or I make some whizbang EFx to do it.
As much as I loathe the Shared Warehouse functionality in Site Configuration, might that be a viable option for you?
I am pretty sure you’re going to find the SO/PO option to be untenable, mostly for accounting reasons. Selling stuff to yourself is usually frowned upon by financial types.
Ah, THAT is good to know.
Yeesh, I cannot imagine that being better at all… I mean, I have never used it, but the last thing I want at this point is to learn and test another new thing. 
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@Ernie For the sake of argument…
All of our sites are under the same tax ID, so they are legally one company.
Now let’s say that in 2020 we had decided to make the other divisions to be companies in Epicor, not sites.
If they were companies, I’d have no choice but to do ICPOs, right? (That’s intercompany purchase orders, since I never spelled that out earlier.)
Would that have been financially unacceptable, then, to make them companies in Epicor even if they were not legally separate entities? Just curious.
(FYI, the reason I went with sites was to force a common part master among sites. It wasn’t really a financial decision, though the tax ID thing did come up often in discussions with consultants. I just don’t recall it being imperative.)
In your hypothetical wouldn’t it be a standard PO And not a ICPO since they are ‘different’ companies.
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If you are a single tax ID, then the first thing any financial auditor would see when there are sales to self would be “cooking the books to increase sales numbers”. Yes, the debits and credits all work, but your revenue is overstated.
This is one of the things that Sarbanes-Oxley covers for publicly traded companies.
If all you want to do is stop doing Transfer Orders, this seems to be a bad practice way of getting out of that hole.
Have you talked to your own finance people? This would affect them GREATLY.
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