Creating International Performa Invoices

Some clients require that they create a “Performa” style invoice for goods entering customs, but do not want to create the final invoice to the customer until the goods clear customs. This is common when goods are brought into duty free zones or custom zone warehouses, and stored their temporarily until final shipment. Solomon gives you great flexibility to control the order steps or processes that your business requires.

Because you have control with the Solomon Order Management Order type, you can easily handle this situation. One way to resolve this business need is to modify the steps in an order type. Here is an example of the order type steps for a Sales Order:

In step 0610, there is an optional print packing slip. This report has the report id of

40.660; as shown at the top of the report screen.

By looking up under the Utilities > Report Control Maintenance for this report screen, we can see there are two versions of this report currently designed:

You can change the report name shown in the above screen, say from Warehouse Bin Location Order to Performa Invoice format.

To accomplish the printing of the Performa Invoice, we are going to “cannibalize” one of these reports and make it look like the Performa Invoice with the Crystal designer modules. I suggest you just re use one of the existing report format ids (i.e. 40660Bin) (This document is not going to cover how to accomplish this task, because it is beyond the scope of this article).

The other change we are going to make is on the order type > Steps is to change step 610 from optional to mandatory.

With these changes you are going to always print out the Performa Invoice, then after goods cleared customs, and then you would go through the normal shipper confirmation step, and then generate an Invoice which flows through to Account Receivable.