Improvements for Shipments

[zsoden]

Hi all,

Firstly let me say just how impressive Inventree is. The developers have done a truly fantastic job thus far!

I own a small electronics manufacturing business and we're currently evaluating Inventree as an upgrade from our existing, limited, self-made system. Thus far it's really promising: we can customise Inventree to cover most requirements and will build a plugin or two for some additional functionality (most notable is the ability to take a photo of stock using a webcam during receipt of the stock).

A lot of the items on our list of limitations from the evaluation thus far has been related to the shipments functionality. If I've misunderstood any of the existing functionality please let me know!

1. We find it typical that a shipment to a customer contains product from multiple customer POs (so multiple Sales Orders in Inventree). It seems that the shipments system has been designed as a subset of the sales orders but in my mind the shipments should be split out into a separate functionality (i.e. another page under the Sales menu). Each shipment would have a globally unique ID, instead of the ID that is unique within the Sales Order. So when a Sales Order line is shipped you have the option of using an existing shipment that could have been created in another Sales Order.
2. A shipment needs to have a "shipment method" field, which is a list of items such as

• Customer collect
• Standard Post
• Express Post
• Fedex TNT

3. Point 2 combined with the tracking number can be used to create a link to the tracking from the shipment page. We've found this immensely useful in our existing system.
4. We've found that it's typically possible to determine the shipment method simply by scanning the corresponding barcode on the TNT address label or Express Post bag. So the ideal workflow is to simply scan the barcode and have the system automatically select the shipment method. It probably makes the most sense for this to be a plugin, since it's very custom behaviour.

Depending on how difficult it is I'd be happy to have one of my developers contribute to this functionality.

Edit: One other advantage of shipments handled separately that I forgot to add is that they could have Extra Line Items for those things that you would like to add to a shipment packing list but don't want to create a part for (i.e. we're sending the customer a sample of a non-stock item).

[SchrodingersGat]

@zsoden thanks for the notes.

I think the idea of globally unique shipments which can be allocated items from multiple shipments is a good one. Some potential issues:

migration

Migrating existing shipments (which may have duplicate IDs) would require some decisions around how to automatically rename existing shipment reference numbers. This may cause contention for some users.

shipment selection

Currently a shipment is pinned to a particular order. Allocation of items against an open shipment may be a little more difficult if the "open" shipments are not "filtered" against the sales order as they are currently.

user interface

Will require a reasonable amount of refactoring of the UI to adjust to these changes.

---

Overall, I support the concept, we would need to carefully consider how to implement it. I think it would be a good addition to managing shipments.

A shipment method field could be easily added as a general purpose text field.

[zsoden]

Thanks for the prompt reply!

Migration
Yes, I understand how that could be an issue. Has a situation like this occurred in any past feature additions?

Shipment Selection
The way our current system works is that the shipments are filtered by matching the shipment customer ID with the Sales Order customer ID. There may be multiple open shipments for a particular customer; the user simply selects which one to add the shipment line to.

User Interface
Yes, I imagine this is a significant UI change. Would it make sense to attempt to work it into the 1.0.0 release (since a large part of this is the PUI change) or as a later release?

What would be the next step to try to get some further support and traction on this?

[SchrodingersGat]

Good point about filtering by customer. We would migrate the model to point to the customer rather than a particular sales order.

Has a situation like this occurred in any past feature additions?

We have made similar migrations previously but we need to consider more carefully now as the code base is more stable and we have a lot more users. We cannot "cowboy" as much as we used to :)

We are pushing for a 1.0.0 release soon, this would likely have to wait for 1.1.0 - so we don't delay our upcoming release.

What would be the next step to try to get some further support and traction on this?

Would your company be willing to sponsor this feature? Generally this is a good way of attracting priority from the dev team

[SchrodingersGat]

I have created an issue for this - #9671

Let's continue the discussion over there

[zsoden]

Totally agree that "cowboying" can't be a part of this now that you're approaching a 1.1.0 release! I'm certainly happy to discuss sponsoring this feature. Over the coming weeks we'll keep working through all of our workflows to make sure that we're going to be able to do everything we need with Inventree. The thinking is to commence use on the 1st of July, using our EOFY stocktake figures. From there we can run it alongside our existing system (duplicating) until we're happy to switch the old system to read only.

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On Sat, 17 May 2025, 7:54 pm Oliver, ***@***.***> wrote: Good point about filtering by customer. We would migrate the model to point to the customer rather than a particular sales order. Has a situation like this occurred in any past feature additions? We have made similar migrations previously but we need to consider more carefully now as the code base is more stable and we have a lot more users. We cannot "cowboy" as much as we used to :) We are pushing for a 1.0.0 release soon, this would likely have to wait for 1.1.0 - so we don't delay our upcoming release. What would be the next step to try to get some further support and traction on this? Would your company be willing to sponsor this feature? Generally this is a good way of attracting priority from the dev team — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#9669 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJUMFPYJOREMZSM25NQU233264BMJAVCNFSM6AAAAAB5KEPI4SVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTGMJXHAYDSNA> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>