Questions Create Shipment for Cash sale

@ellie what is the reason for creating a shipment on the cash sale? Are you actually needing to process the shipment or are you using the process to facilitate a pick sheet process? I ask because i encountered the latter for a customer and created a new printed from the sales order info and added this to the automation steps. If you indeed need to process a shipment, I think the easiest way to do this is handle it with an order type that follows the sales order automation behavior. What if you create an order type similar to the SO type allowing you to track the usage as needed? Therein you can create a payment on the sales order and then when you create and process the shipment and create the invoice for the shipment it will automatically apply the payment created on the sales order? 

Here is some context:

We bulk import prepaid orders daily.

Our current process:

1. Import sales order

2. Create shipment

3. Confirm shipment (which also creates the label via the Built-in carrier plugin)

4. Prepare invoice

5. Release invoice

6. Import payment

7. Release payment

8. If customer has terms, we eventually need to enter the payment at a later date and apply the payment manually

The problems with this process are:

1. Most of these steps cannot trigger the next steps (some can via automation steps, which can get complicated when something errors or when trying to delete/ revers a document). This leaves the user running a process and then waiting until it is done until they can proceed to the next step.

2. Processing so many transactions overloads the system resources

3. Since the orders are paid for, they are essentially cash sales and there is no reason to add additional unnecessary transactions which to my understanding count towards Acumatica's transactions per month

4. For customers with terms, I cannot utilize the "Auto-Apply payments" setting and am stuck with many transactions that either need to be manually applied or applied via and import scenario after the Acumatica references were generated.

Potential solution:

Import the orders as cash sales that can shipped in order to get a label. This would result in less resource usage (just 1 import), no need for use to wait for 1 process to complete before moving on to the next, no application needed, less transactions created, easier to handle / create filters / manipulate automation steps since its all just 1 transaction.

@kevin-ruppert Regarding adding payments to the sales orders, that would definitely help. Is there anyway to do that via import (The order volume is too much for manual entering)? it navigates to a new screen when creating the payment so I assumed it would not be possible.

You can only get a shipping label using the out-of-the-box carrier integrations on a Shipment transaction as far as I know which means you need a Shipment transaction in addition to the Sales Order transaction.

As for Payments, you don't have to create your Import Scenario on the Sales Orders (SO004295) screen with the complication of pushing the CREATE PAYMENT or CREATE PREPAYMENT buttons on the PAYMENTS tab.

Just create your payment Import Scenario on the Payments and Applications (AR302000) screen and populate the ORDERS TO APPLY tab. The end result will be a Payment that is applied to the Order.

Thanks Tim.

I couldn't find a way to apply the specific order we need based on our order ID. It goes by the Atacama SO number, which we font have until it was imported. 

I would need to export the orders to get the SO RefNbr, but at that point i may as well simple add the invoices to the payment.