Combined Shipments in Dynamics NAV: Several Shipments
on a single Invoice

Advantages of Combined Shipment

On the part of the invoice recipient (your customer), combined shipments have the advantage that he or she receives only one invoice and thus all follow-up processes (approval workflow, accounting, transfer of invoice amount, etc.) are simplified. This is because it is no longer necessary to laboriously process various documents individually.

You can also save time and money in internal processing with the combined shipment, as you only have to (print and) send one invoice document and there is only one invoice item to be processed internally (posting payment/payment discount, creating reminders, etc.).

Activate Combined Shipments

To be able to combine shipments from different orders into a single invoice, you must activate the “Combine Shipments” option for the respective customer. It can be activated on the “Shipping” info tab of the customer card.

The information as to whether a customer may use the combined shipment function is then transferred from the customer to the respective document when a new sales quote or order is created.

You are not allowed to manually change this feature within the document in Dynamics NAV, as the “Combine Shipments” field is only available as background information to the ERP user who enters the document. It is therefore also not possible to subsequently activate the feature in a sales quote or order that has already been created if the customer was not yet activated for the combined shipment when the document was created.

Combined Shipment Process

For a customer, there are several open orders in the sales order backlog for which the shipment has already been carried out. To ensure that there is not an individual invoice being created for each order, use the search action and enter “Combined Shipments” in the search box to call up the following page.

The following settings or options are available to users here:

• Posting Date: the posting date of the combined shipment is defined here.
• Document Date: the document date for the combined shipment is defined here.
• Cal. Inv. Discount: determines whether the invoice discount should be calculated automatically during combined shipment creation.
• Post Invoices: determines whether the created combined shipments should also be directly posted. If the feature is not active, the combined shipments are created but not yet posted. This gives users the opportunity to check and correct them if necessary.
• Only Std. Payment Terms: a standard payment term can be stored on the customer card for a customer. If a different payment term is stored in a sales order, this sales order can be excluded from the combined shipment.
• Copy Text Lines: if manually inserted text lines are contained in the sales delivery lines, these are adopted if the feature is active. Standard text code or text modules are always adopted.

In addition to the previously mentioned settings and options, users also have the following two options for using a filter. These can be combined:

• Sales Order: all fields in the sales order (header info) can be filtered. Use case: Combined Shipments are only to be created for a specific customer. For example, only for the customer with the no. 1234656.
• Posted Sales Shipment: all fields in the posted sales orders (header info) can be filtered. Use case: only posted sales deliveries up to a certain posting date should be considered. For example up to the posting date ..05.07.2017.

The combined shipment run is triggered via the “OK” button. Once the shipments have been combined, Dynamics NAV displays information on how many invoices have been created.

Depending on the setting, the invoices were only created or also posted directly.

A text line with the respective shipping note no. is inserted above the respective invoice entries, so that both the user and the customer can later recognize which shipments are part of this combined shipment.

Apart from that, the content of a combined shipment does not differ from that of a normal invoice, which is created when the sales order is invoiced.

Alternative Process for Combined Shipments

In addition to the method described above for creating combined shipments, Dynamics NAV also offers an alternative process method where a sales invoice is created for the respective customer for whom a combined shipment is to be created. The “Get Shipment Lines” action in the invoice lines (Line ➤ Functions ➤ Get Shipment Lines) then displays all sales lines from all released sales orders of the customer that have already been delivered and can therefore be invoiced.

These can be marked (single and multiple marking) and transferred to the sales invoice lines.

Here too, the corresponding shipping note no. is automatically inserted above the respective invoice item using a text module.

Advantage

This method has the advantage that combined shipments can also be created for customers for whom the “Combine Shipments” option is not set up in the master data.

Disadvantage

The disadvantage of this method is that this function can only ever be executed for one customer and is a purely manual process.