Vision Invoicing is a data store of information which is used to generate invoices which are then printed and/or emailed to customers and an export file is generated to import into your accounts system.

There are several invoice categories handled, data is either extracted from the other Vision applications or it is pushed to Vision Invoicing from them. Scheduled jobs handle this extraction / pushing of the data to get it into the Invoicing system.

Goods Inwards

Charges for the receiving & handling of goods coming into the warehouse are recorded against the Vision Warehousing pre advice, see GI - Receipting Details. The pre advice has to be ‘Final receipted’ for the charge to be pulled into Invoicing, this occurs nightly at a specified time.

Sundry charges are also handled in the same fashion, however you can continue to add these to the pre advices after they’re final receipted and the next night when the routine runs they’ll be imported.

Stock Storage

Also known as rent; storage is charged by single, case, pallet or KG (known as the storage type) per day, week, month, quarter or year (known as the charge period), see Storage Charge. Invoices are raised on an invoice period, invoices can include charges for multiple charge periods. A further explanation is available here: Weekly charge period with 'period' invoicing.

Each charge period has it’s own job scheduled to push information across to Invoicing outside of normal business hours.

The standard methodology which the system follows for charging storage is on the basis of “per period or part thereof” meaning that whenever the stock arrives the full period is charged, i.e. if stock arrives on the last day of the week the entire week will still be charged.

Free rent

When stock is receipted it can be marked as “Free Rent”, these will have no rent charged for them. To change this after stock is receipted, untick “Free Rent” in Stock Maintenance (Utilities Group | Maintenance).

Free rent periods

These can apply to the customer setup which delays the start of rent charging. The pre advice “Rent Commences” field is set in this scenario (GI - Receipting Details). For more information see: Charge Profiles | Storage Charge.

Rent and transfers

The “Rent Commences” field is what the Invoicing system uses to determine when to start charging rent. When the source and destination customers are the same “Rent Commences” to be the same for the receiving stock when the source stock was supposed to start charging in the future, OR where the rent has already started charging then 'Rent Commences' will be set to the start of the next charging period, for example:

Daily > tomorrow
Weekly > day of the full extract
Monthly > first day of the next month
Quarter > first day of the next quarter
Annual > first day of the next charging year.

The pre advice created from the transfer order has a “Pro Rata Rent” tickbox, in the case of transferring stocks where the source and destination customers are the same then this will be unticked meaning that pro rata charges for rent are not raised.

Checking imported charges

As both the pro rata and the standard charges accumulate, they’re visible in the Outstanding Group reports which can be used to check that data has been successfully imported. These form the basis of the invoice.

Stock Charges

These are ancillary charges for services offered while stock is in storage and include:

Each night a routine is run which pulls the records into Vision Invoicing. In the event of the routine not picking up any entries, the next time it runs it’ll pick up all entries which have not been picked up already.

Good Outwards

A Vision Invoicing routine runs each day and retrieves ungrouped data from Vision Warehousing; the "Original Data".  It stores this in Vision Invoicing and then consolidates that data which users then later raise invoices from.

Original Data - The data we then group / consolidate is:

• Orders information (for order, bottles ordered, cases ordered, pallets ordered, order line and document charges)

• Stock movement information (for bottle picking, case picking and pallet picking charges)

This is the only invoicing routine to build the charges within Vision Invoicing itself, it was designed because it looks in several databases to take information for orders processed, orders picked, types of orders, order lines, picked line etc, and uses this collated data to build the consolidated charges.  This final consolidated data is grouped into daily summaries, for example no of orders for a given day, no of order lines, no of bottles picked.  The reason for this data being consolidated or grouped is that there is little point us duplicating ungrouped or unconsolidated data when it's never used and we are only looking for total quantity of items, such as number of orders in one day etc.   We therefore extract the information for a single customer/site for a given day and we then store this in the database for invoicing at a later time, so for each type of goods out we count the items for the category and store the count value.

The consolidated data can be checked using the exceptions report on Vision Invoicing which looks at the trends of information extracted, and should information ever be missing this can easily be recreated as the Vision warehousing information base is maintained for a lengthy time.

Transport Charges

Transport charges come from Vision Distribution and the system pushes the data from Vision Distribution to Vision invoicing on a nightly basis, we find all records which are marked as status D (this is confirmed delivered) and each record is output to Vision Invoicing, once this is output we then mark the Distribution record as status "I" (Invoiced).

Any distribution records marked as status "X" are cancelled however when the records are cancelled users are asked if they’re still to be charged or not, as such cancelled deliveries can still be charged.