I have a customer that does drop ship orders to cu...
# generalk
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 6:17 PMI have a customer that does drop ship orders to customers' customers. How would you set up sub-customers and how would the sales orders / fulfillment / invoices be set up?
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 6:19 PMThey need to bill to their customers, but drop ship to their customers's customers.
j
James Morris
01/27/2025, 7:06 PMIf they don't actually have a relationship with the sub-customers I'd probably just keep it simple and set those up as different addresses for the customer that you're billing. Not sure how many addresses you have, where it might eventually become too unwieldy, but especially if there's a reasonable number and you don't need to keep track of the sub-customers in some special way, that'd be the easiest/cleanest, I'd think.
k
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 7:07 PMThat's what NetSuite said to do but they have customers with hundreds of their own customers
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 7:09 PMI looked up drop shipping in the manual but it's only got instructions for drop shipping from a vendor to your own customer. Nothing I can see about if you ARE the vendor doing the drop shipping on behalf of your customer.
j
James Morris
01/27/2025, 7:13 PMDo you have a requirement to maintain/track the sub-customer relationship in some way, other than where the item should be delivered? Have you tried loading a few hundred addresses into a customer and seeing if that causes any issues? I.e. UI performance is reasonable, the attention field works okay for tracking/searching the subcustomer name, etc.?
k
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 7:15 PMNo relationship other than shipping
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 7:15 PMIt's a new implementation so no UI performance yet
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 7:17 PMI'm thinking they should use the NetSuite recommendation as you're suggesting, adding sub customers as ship to addresses, until it becomes a problem, and then come up with something custom once they've been using NetSuite for a bit and know how they need it to work.
j
James Morris
01/27/2025, 7:17 PMSo in effect those subcustomers are really just different addresses for you, so creating those as addresses should work accounting/business-wise.
k
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 7:17 PMIt probably sounds like more of a pain in the butt to them than it will be in reality
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 7:18 PMAccounting-wise I don't think I'd want sub-customers in the system. They should never have a GL balance
j
James Morris
01/27/2025, 7:18 PMAgreed. Performance-wise you could stress-test it by 10X or 50Xing the number of addresses on some customers in a sandbox and see if that does any harm. If no, then, sounds like a pretty good solution to me.
k
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 9:34 PMOn further investigation, it
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 9:34 PMit's more complicated. My client owns the inventory, so it's not true 3PL. They also sometimes sell directly instead of 3rd party.
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 9:34 PMto the same customers' customers
Kristopher Wood
01/27/2025, 9:36 PMso I recommended the following:
1. A custom Ship-To Customer field on Sales Orders, Fulfillments, and Invoices
2. A relatively simple script to copy the default ship-to address from the selected customer, when populated, to the current transaction's ship-to address.
a
Aaron McCausland
01/27/2025, 10:26 PMMy employer has something like that, but for Ship-from (had to create custom fields to select the ship from entity and the desired address from its address book). Seems to work all right. They wanted this Ship From to show up on the PDFs of the purchase orders as well, so that was another thing to take care of.
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