Questions Creating Shipments (Process Orders screen) and ERP Transaction Counts

Our company creates hundreds of parts orders per day.  Some via ecommerce sites, some entered by CSRs.  About 50% of these can be filled at the time of creation; the rest may be partially filled (if backorder allowed) or are waiting for an item to ship.

Right now our process is for the order to be created (via multiple methods), and then a job runs every 10 minutes (on the Process Orders screen) to Create Shipments.  We then have another job at adds those shipments to the picking queue for paperless picking.  This has been working great--the job fails to create shipments on 75% or more of the orders currently in Process Orders, but who cares.

Acumatica cares, apparently.  We're getting yelled at for being 500% over our ERP Transaction Count limit.  Apparently each run of Process Orders is touching the orders in the list, whether shipments can be created or not.

Our VAR turned this into a development task (when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail).  They created a customization (a process screen that we run once an hour) that would review every open order and set a flag on it if the customization feels the order is ready to ship.  We've been struggling through testing this for two months.  Last week I felt we finally had it and I published it in live, as well as updated the scheduled job for Process Orders to filter the orders to be touched to ones marked as "Ready to Ship".

Today we found another bug in the Ready to Ship process screen; it is looking to see if there is available stock in a warehouse to fill an order, but if the order has items hard allocated to it (like from a received linked PO), the quantity isn't "available" in the warehouse so the order isn't marked as ready to ship.  We're working on fixing that now.

I've got to get away from customizations to work around things that should just work.  I just have to believe that we are missing something.  This has to be common--I've never worked for a distributor that had someone pressing a "Create Shipment" (or in other systems, create pick list or other terms) button on every single order when that person determines that the order is ready to be picked.  The scheduled job running Process Orders worked great, but we're in violation of our license because of it.  How do other distribution companies get orders into the picking queue without resorting to either manual intervention or paying for licensing that they don't actually need?