Returns Via Negative QTY

[heinscott]

Hello. Anyone with a lot of Able Commerce experience would be of great help to me right now...
Because of the way AC processes orders (I think, as well as most Shopping Carts), it's nearly impossible to create an automated way of sending order information to QuickBooks whenever returns are processed. Because the returns are included on an order for a previous date, that information has already been entered into QuickBooks, and, subsequently it creates a nightmare to try to reimport. So, in order to make things easy, I thought it might be best to either A) Process a new order with negative quantities when a refund needs to be done... or B) Create a new module for returns. Now, option A definitely is the easiest, especially since AC allows for negatives. My main question is this: Does this work in Able Commerce? Has anyone tried this and found it successful? Will it readjust inventory levels properly? I would try this myself, but, right now I am just customizing a demo store, and will not be live for a while yet, since I have 2,000 product, 6,000 options, and numerous customization to implement before we switch over.
Anyone that could offer any help on this problem would be most greatly appreciated!
Thanks again,
Scott

[Logan Rhodehamel]

I am not sure whether your option A would work or not. I think our API prevents negative quantities and negative order totals. That's not to say you couldn't force the fields into the database with a custom query. Sohaib might have additional thoughts on this.

[AbleMods]

I've been handling it by way of double-posting returns, re-ships etc. They happen so few and far between for my situation, it was easiest not to try and code it at all. My only alternative was what you described, a separate routine to match/compare every order for additional items. Not exactly fun coding so I moved on.

Refunds work fine because you pull payment records by datetime.

ac_OrderItems really needs an added/edited timestamp pair added to the data class for me to effectively push my data into QB.

[heinscott]

We have returns to process very often, which makes it imperative to get something functional. I did try an additional order, and although you can't enter negative quantities initially, you can, however, edit the order and force quantities negative. Everything shows properly also in daily totals, the day of the original order positive, the day with new, negative order, profits below the line. I don't know what this will do to the system ultimately, but, hopefully nothing too seriously bad will occur.
I just can't be sure, as I'm still in production.
Thanks again for the help.

[sohaib]

Not having considered the negative quantity scenario in our development I can't say for sure whether there is any part of AC that might not work correctly with negative quantity. Apparently it seems to work but only extensive testing will reveal if that is the case throughout AC.

I agree with Joe that order items needs some additional information associated with them. Probably we can do this in our next AC revision. However for now, if we consider customization an option (or the add-on that Joe is developing) what we can do is that when an order item is returned we associate an order item input field to it and store the required information (what ever it is) in that field. We can then use that field value to let the QB know that this order item was returned.
May be Joe can shed some light on whether this is workable or not? I don't know the QB API in great detail.

[AbleMods]

In a situation where you absolutely must have every transaction since the last "run", the only option is to record the highest record id value at the end of the previous run.

Then you would begin each future run using that last id value. Not elegant, but it would work well within the current design, easily support future upgrades and does the job in all situations since the id values are always unique and incremental.

My Ac_StoreSettings table just keeps growing

[heinscott]

Ahhh... Good idea Joe! I also, looked for a DateTime stamp in Order_Items... Did not consider tracking the id....
That just might work for us. (Do returned items show up as a new id in the table??)
Thank you all, again, for the great help.

-Scott

[AbleMods]

(Do returned items show up as a new id in the table??)

It depends on how you're doing your returns. The best procedure I've found is adding an additional line item to the order with a negative quantity. Then I post the refund which is essentially a negative payment. At that point the order math works out properly. Not sure yet on inventory because my stock values come from distributor data feeds, I simply change my inventory quantities to whatever they tell me is in stock.

Given both entries are new records, they will automatically get new id values when they are added to their respective tables.

The only time this route would not work is when you make revisions to existing records. So I modified my business procedures so that the original order line items are never changed. Any required revisions to an order must be made using new line items or new payment records.