Admin, Warehouse, and Customer notes

APT University: Transaction notes and Custom Fields

Hello and welcome to APTU, Today we’re going to be Focusing on Transaction notes and custom fields and their capabilities throughout AdvancePro.

AdvancePro has a number of fields used for helping with communication on all kinds of records and transactions, Today we’re going to be jumping back and forth a bit as we discuss each one, These fields are Line item notes, Transaction notes, custom fields – typically these are fixed, but there are also what we call fillable custom fields, and there are also cross reference fields, and last but not least, Reasons. Today we’re going to take a tour of these features, how they behave, what they’re intended for and how to set them up. This is intended as a guide for designing your own needs for customizing the main documents AdvancePro Produces so we’ll be touching on a lot of these documents today.

The first area we’ll touch on is basic transaction notes. These are available on All customer documents,(Order, Pick/pack/ship and Invoice) all vendor documents (order, receive, and Bill), and the Manufacturing Work order.
So on the vendor order you’ll see this as a button with the word notes, on the work order you’ll see a textbox in the lower left, and on the customer order you’ll see this notes button, and if there are already notes on this order you might see the note printed on the screen, but you will also see that notes button highlighted in red.

When we go into the notes on the customer or vendor order, you’ll see that these notes can be directed at the customer or sales person by having it on the order (with the option to print either on the order or on the invoice, you can also leave the notes in AdvancePro and post them to admin only, and you can post a note to the warehouse for any special handling you might need, and those notes can be put on the pick, pack, or ship slips.

One other thing you can do is go to Admin> site settings> additional settings, and enable the customer default note setting. What this does is it allows you to put in a note for a customer on the customer profile and then it will appear on all orders from that customer. You can also now save a specific note as being the default for all orders, so this allows you to have default things like terms and conditions pre-populated on all orders.

This brings us to Line Item notes. Line item notes are available only on customer orders and vendor orders, but they do have some unique capabilities. You can access them in AdvancePro by clicking this notes icon on the line item itself, the note you enter in this popup will print on the bottom of your orders. But they will note the line item, so this is one way you can provide detail about anything special to do with the specific item, you’ll also see there is an option to pass the line item note to the vendor order, so if you have special needs for that item from your customer, you can have those notes pass to the vendor when you process a vendor order on demand

Next we have some custom fields we can enable. Custom fields are not on orders by default unlike the transaction notes and the line item notes. Some of them don’t appear on orders at all.

Our options for these custom fields are found on the Admin Panel under site settings, in the custom fields and custom fields 2 tabs. You can see we have 3 that are for the products, these appear inline on an order – One of these gets used for Duties if you enable our Freight Module.

We also have 3 that can be put on a product but aren’t available on an order, these are reference fields and they’re also fixed – so they can be changed only from the product record.]

Customer and vendor records also get some fixed custom fields that are for reference only, they don’t appear on any document.

Finally we have 3 custom fields you can use to track batches, this is great if you need to attach a certificate number or any other information to a batch or lot, these are configured under utilities on the lot/serial tab.

Now we also have some fillable custom fields, which means whenever they appear on a transaction they can be filled in, we can have up to three on the product line items, and 3 more on the customer order. To fill in these these custom fields for the order, click the blue checkbox button on the lower left.

These custom fields appear above your order line items in special boxes.

Similar to these you’ll also find editable cross reference fields, These were introduced a long time ago, but they are now newly available for Vendor orders as well as customer orders. You’ll find these on the custom fields 2 tab in site settings, and they are found in the upper right corner near your PO number field while you place an order.

Reasons also appear throughout AdvancePro, These are more for audit trail but they do appear on the Transfer order or stock adjustment, whenever you send back or void a picking slip or invoice, whenever you edit the product settings or vendor settings on a product. So these are good for knowing why something is happening, for example in a transfer order, you can use this to tell your employees who are receiving the goods exactly what they’re going to do with it.

Finally, we have records notes, these appear on your customer, product, and vendor records, you’ll see these on the first page for customers (we discussed how this can be turned into an item note). And for vendors. For the products, you’ll find these notes under the additional information. To see a product, it’s image, the description and notes, you can click the product name whenever it appears and you’ll be able to look at its basic details.

So this concludes today’s APTU.
Thank you for watching.