I HATE, HATE, HATE how Epicor does the NULL ship to on customer creation. It makes no sense to me and causes innumerable headaches for users of the system.
Hold on while I go destroy something to calm down…
Ok, I’m back and settled down enough to explain how the Customer works in Epicor.
When you create a Customer in Epicor, it is creating 2 records. One is in the Customer table and is generally referred to as the “Sold To”. The second record is created in the ShipTo table and is generally referenced as the “Ship To”. In addition to Sold To and Ship To, there is also the Bill To. The Bill To is stored on the Customer table, not in the CustBillTo table like you would expect.
Let’s just say that is all we have done at this point. We created a new Customer and only entered what the system requires. If you create a Sales Order, the Sold To, Bill To, and Ship To will all have the same address and the Ship To field will be “” (it is actually not a null value it is an empty field). Additionally, the Bill To address will be defaulting to the address on the Customer Detail screen.
If you want a different Bill To address, you have to go to the Customer Billing page and enter a different address there. If you do, that address becomes the default Bill To. It also enters the information into the BT fields in the Customer table. You can actually add more than one Bill To to a customer by creating another customer and using the Alternate Bill To functionality. If you do add an Alternate Bill To to a customer, that data is stored in the CustBillTo table.
Now the Ship To (oh how I hate you). The address that is on the Customer Detail page is the address that gets stored in the ShipTo table with that “” Ship To ID. If you want to change the address on that record, you have to change the Sold To address. If you want the Sold To address and Ship To address to be different, that is when you need to create a new Ship To ID on the customer record to have something different. But, adding a new Ship To ID adds a record to the ShipTo table where you will have 2 Ship Tos for the customer. The one you just created and the “” one. Which of the Ship Tos is the default one? Glad you asked. The default Ship To is the one that is marked as Primary Ship To, but if you have multiple Ship To records in the ShipTo table and none of them are marked as primary, the “” Ship To record is the default.
As an added bonus, let’s talk about Contacts. Customer Contacts can exist at two levels, the Customer (Sold To) level and the Ship To level. Additionally, the same exact contact can exist at both the Customer and Ship To level with different Contact IDs. If you are reporting on the Ship To only table, you have to be very careful that you know what you are after. Without a join to something like the OrderHed, you must know what Ship To you need to filter on. Otherwise, you can end up with the wrong list of contacts. Additionally, if you want contacts on the “” Ship To, you actually add them to the Customer contacts, not the Ship To contacts.
And all of this could be avoided if Epicor would just create the first Ship To record with a 1 instead of a “”. I think I even put in an Idea for this, but I’m to angry to go look for it.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Oh, and for good measure, I HATE you Ship TO.
