The flows

Despatch advice

What is on the lorry, before it arrives. Sent from the packing slip you posted, and detailed down to the pallet where your warehouse works that way.

The despatch advice is the document that earns its keep in a warehouse. A receiving partner who has one can book a delivery in by scanning a pallet label instead of counting boxes, and can tell you the same day that something is missing rather than at the end of the month.

What starts it

Posting a packing slip on the sales order. The document is produced from the packing slip, so what it says is what you actually shipped, not what was ordered.

The packing structure

Where you run warehouse management, the despatch advice carries the shipment as it is physically built: pallets, what is on each, and where a pallet holds other pallets, that too.

The structure follows two rules that come from how the goods are actually stacked. A licence plate either holds items or holds other licence plates, never both. And the nesting goes one level deep: a pallet of cases, not a pallet of pallets of cases. That matches what a warehouse builds and what a receiving system can read.

Each pallet carries its identifier, so the label on the physical pallet and the line in the document are the same number. That is the whole point: the receiver scans, and the system already knows what is on it.

Batch and serial numbers

For food, pharmaceuticals and anything else with traceability, the despatch advice carries the batch number and the quantity from that batch, per line. Where one order line ships from three batches, that is three lines in the document, each with its own batch.

Where it ships from

Some partners need to know the sending warehouse, because it decides which of their sites the delivery belongs to. The module works this out from the lines: when every line ships from the same warehouse, that warehouse is stated. When two lines disagree, none is, because a single wrong answer is worse than none.

The outcome is recorded on the message, so when a partner asks why the field was empty, the answer is there rather than a guess.

Partial deliveries

Post two packing slips and two despatch advices go out, each describing its own shipment. The tracker shows both against the order, in the order they happened. Neither replaces the other.

Receiving one

As a buyer, an incoming despatch advice tells you what your supplier has sent before it arrives. It can prepare the receipt so the goods can be booked against it rather than counted at the door. That is on the purchase side.

When a partner says the document is wrong

Almost always one of three things: the pallet identifiers in the document do not match the labels on the pallets, the quantities are in a different unit than they expect, or the shipment was repacked after the packing slip was posted. The first two are setup. The third is a process problem the document cannot fix, and the honest answer is to post the packing slip after packing rather than before.