In OMICS today, buying groups work by crediting a distributor account at the end of the month, and debiting (with one big transaction) the buying group (or bill-to) account with an invoice. This is done automatically as part of the monthend and there is no opportunity for the lab to review before the credits and debits are created. Optionally, a discount is calculated on the purchases and applied to the buying group as well. The ordering ECP sees the original (full) amount of each invoice on their statement; the buying group sees the total discount that is calculated.
This allows printing a statement for the original customer, showing their purchases, but without any detail on the buying group statement at all. For example, on the statement for the buying group we see:
and on the statement for the specific ECP we see all the detail, in addition to the credit for what was applied to the buying group account:
My question is how best to handle the "moving" of charges from the ECP to the buying group. This could be done on-demand, for a range of dates, which would create the entries similar to how we create them today. That would allow volume discounts to be calculated on the buying group account after the debits have been created, for example, and would retain the detail on the
Buying groups are just bill-to/order-by
Buying groups are really just a special (maybe not even special?) case of bill-to/ordered-by for orders. In the case of a buying group, the order can be entered to the same customer as usual, with or without a different ship-to address, but with another field indicated they are to be billed to a different customer. Keeping the ordered-by customer the same keeps all production reports and OE screens as-is; adding the bill-to customer field adds just one optional entry to the OE screen.
At time of completion, when creating the AR-TRX record, the sale is posted to the bill-to account, and the ordered-by account is put into a new field on the AR-TRX file. Statements are normally then created for the bill-to accounts, but we could have a "special" statement (or maybe an option on the statement printing screen to print statements for ordered-by accounts) which would print the statement detail using the ordered-by account as the key instead of the bill-to. (Maybe it would be clearer to even call this document by a different name? To be discussed).
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the "Customers" database, you will need to create the buying group account as well as the buying group members. When creating the buying group members, you will need to enter the buying group account number in the Bill-To # field. In the example below, BUYGRP, is the buying group and BGM-001 is a buying group member.
Orders will be entered using the buying group members. Once the orders are completed, entries are automatically created in the AR Transaction file with the appropriate Bill To (which is the buying group).
Before printing the statements, you will need to select the buying group statement template in the "Customers A/R" database. Our default template is STMBG001.XSL This statement lists all entries for the buying group, as well as entries for all buying group members, sorted by each member. You can also choose a different paper size or use the system default setting found in System Settings.
This is a portion of a sample statement for buying group BUYGRP.
if you wish to print individual statements for buying group members, normally you would use the system default statement template. There is a checkbox, "Print Statement as Buying Group Member", which you must check in order to print a statement. When left unchecked, a statement will not be printed. However, you can override this setting when printing a statement for just one account on the statement printing screen.
This is a portion of a sample statement for buying group member BGM-001
