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Electronic Transfer Notes

If you own more than one shop and wish to transfer stock between stores and do not have a central database then you can transfer stock to your other stores using this method instead of through the inter-store transfer method.

Transferring Store

There are 2 ways to operate this feature from the transferring store

  1. The way the shops are set up are a warehouse shipping to franchisees that are treated as customers and charged through the invoicing module from the warehouse
  2. The second way is a simple stock transfer between 2 shops where one is used as the receiving shop from the supplier/wholesaler

Invoiced Customers

For invoiced customers you need to set the the ProEPOS serial/licence number in the Other Details field of the customer record so ProEPOS can identify the customer as another ProEPOS user.

When processing an order for the customer you need to process it as a standard sale and charge the goods to the customer's account.

Generate an invoice for the outstanding balance and when this is printed ProEPOS will create an ETN file using all the sales lines on the invoice.

The ETN file is then uploaded to server where the customers system will pick it up and process it (see below). If more than one invoice has been processed before the ETN file has been processed by the receiving store the additional ETN will be appended to the end of the file on the server.

Standard stock transfer

The receiving shop needs to be set up as a cost centre/supplier with the ProEPOS serial/licence number in square brackets, e.g. [123-45678], after the name of the shop in cost centre record.

Process the transfer in the stock movement area as described earlier in the manual.

When the transfer is posted in the normal fashion. ProEPOS detects that the customer is another ProEPOS user (i.e. has a serial number in square brackets after the name in name field of the cost centre) and creates an ETN using all lines within the transfer.

The ETN file is then uploaded to server where the customers system will pick it up and process it (see below). If more than one transfer has been processed before the ETN file has been processed by the receiving store the additional ETN will be appended to the end of the file on the server.

Receiving Store

  1. A separate background thread in ProEPOS periodically logs in to the FTP server and checks for a .csv file, where is the licence number of the ProEPOS installation.
  2. Where a file is found under that name, the file is download and deleted from the server.
  3. Each ETN in the file is imported into the local database as a Purchase Order. The PO number of the Purchase Order is always a six digit number beginning "9", followed by the originating store's invoice number, padded as required with zero's. Eg. for invoice number 35, the resulting PO number will be 900035. In the highly unlikely event that two stores send stock to the same store with the same invoice number at the same time (or at least before the first has been received on and therefore deleted), the system will decrement the first digit of the PO number (ie. the "9") until it reaches an unused number (eg. "800035"). The supplier of the order is set to an automatically created supplier under the name specified in the header of the ETN. This will either be the first line of the sending store's licence or an over-riding value set through a config option on the sending store's system.
  4. Where a product in an ETN does not exist in the local database, it is created using the details in the ETN. Note that the cost price of the product is always set to the retail price in the ETN (ie. on the customer's invoice, as this is the cost price of the product to the customer). Where a product record does already exist, any details associated with the product are updated to match those in the ETN (but this behaviour can be suppressed - see the config options below).
  5. An "ETN Notification" is printed on the receipt printer, informing the store that the stock is incoming (this will also give the staff chance to review the transfer/order and report any issues to the sending store).
  6. When the stock arrives it is received on using the same process as a regular PO (in fact, to the system, there is no difference between a PO created through an ETN and a system generated PO).

Notes

All stores within an organisation share the same FTP account and all files are uploaded to the same folder/directory on the server.

An ETN file on the server can contain multiple ETN's. Each ETN in the file consists of a "header" line, one or more "detail" lines and a "trailer" line. All lines are comma separated and begin with either a "H", "D" or "T". The header record contains the invoice number on the originating system (used to compose the PO number) and the name of the sending store, which will become the "supplier" of the order (which is either the first line of the licence file or the value of the corresponding, over-riding config option - see below). The detail lines consist of the barcode, quantity and line cost of each product on the originating invoice, along with all the (main) associated details of each product (department, VAT rate, etc). The trailer line consists simply of a "T" to indicate the end of the ETN.

When a product is auto added to the database, the cost price is set to the retail price in the ETN (which is the customer's buy price, as will be on the invoice) and the retail price is set to the cost price multiplied by the value of the default mark-up config option (see below).

There is no concept of master/slave and all stores within an organisation (or rather, any/all stores which share an FTP account on our server) can upload/download ETN's to each other (subject to the config options below being set correctly).