Moqui Marble ERP User Guide

• Introduction
• Supplier and Customer Diagram
• Concepts and Definitions
  • Party
  • Product & Asset
  • Facility
  • Order & Return
  • Shipment
  • Invoice & Payment
  • Work Effort

Introduction

Marble is an ERP applications for retailers and wholesalers with comprehensive operational and managerial functionality including:

• Customer and Supplier Management
• Product Information, Content, and Pricing Management
• Internal and External Content Management
• Sales and Purchase Order Processing
• Customer and Supplier Returns
• Inventory and Warehouse Management
• Basic Manufacturing with Production Runs
• Incoming and Outgoing Shipments, Picklist Management and Streamlined Packing/Shipping
• Receivable and Payable Invoices
• Incoming and Outgoing Payments
• General Ledger with Automated Posting and Financial Reports
• Operational and other Reporting, Statistics, and Budgets

This guide is organized in sub-pages (see page tree to the left) by business activity with recommendations based on common business needs. The two primary operational flows are:

1. Order to Cash: general sales operations
2. Procure to Pay: general purchasing operations

There are also sections for Configuration, Accounting, Warehouse, etc that are for internal management and tracking and are not part of these two primary business processes.

Supplier and Customer Diagram

While many business acitivties are internal to an organization most involve an interaction with an external Party. This diagram shows common interactions with the two primary external Party Roles:

1. Supplier for Procure to Pay
2. Customer for Order to Cash

Concepts and Definitions

Party

A Party is a Person or Organization. A Role describes how a Party is related to, or involved with, something in the system.

Many things in the system can be associated with many parties in different roles and many have certain parties that should always be specified. For example an Order always has a Vendor Party and a Customer Party, and an Invoice alway has a From Party and a To Party. A Role may also be directly assigned to a Party such as Customer, Supplier, and Employee to tell the system how to treat that Party. A Party may have multiple direct roles and may be associated in different roles with other records such as Orders, Payments, Work Efforts, etc.

An Organization using the system to manage and track operations is referred to as an Internal Organization (a Party with the Internal Role).

Product & Asset

A Product is a model of anything you might buy, sell, use, store, etc. There are different types of Product for: physical goods (Assets) including inventory, equipment, and supplies; digital goods; good and facility usage; services; and others.

An Asset represents a physical instance of a Product such as inventory, equipment, and supplies. An Asset Receipt is a record of inventory or other types of Assets received from an Incoming Shipment or produced by a production run (a type of Work Effort). An Asset Issuance is a record of Assets delivered by a Shipment or consumed by a production run.

Facility

A Facility is a place where inventory or other Assets are stored and used, or where business operations are done. Warehouses and retail stores are Facilities with Asset records for inventory in optionally configured Facility Locations. A Facility may have child Facilities like an office building with meetings rooms, each of which may have their own schedule.

Order & Return

An Order is an agreement between two parties (a Customer and a Vendor) for the exchange of goods or services for Payment or like kind exchange. These agreements go through various phases dependending on circumstances and may optionally go through prelimary statuses such as Quote Requested and Proposed by Vendor for Quoting. Eventually an Order is Placed by the Customer, Approved by the Vendor, and once fulfilled is Completed by the Vendor.

For a Sales Order the Vendor is an Internal Organization, and for a Purchase Order the Customer is an Internal Organization. An Order may have multiple Parts to split it for fulfillment variations, multi-party agreements, and so on.

A Return represents the reversal of invoiced order items including products, fees, discounts, etc. The results of a Return may include a Return Shipment, Refund Payment, Credit Memo Invoice, Replacement Order, and so on. These can all exist indepdent of a Return but a Return is useful to tie these back to the original Order to better track what happened and why.

Shipment

A Shipment represents a transfer of physical assets between locations. An Outgoing Shipment generally goes from an Origin Facility to a shipping address associated with the To Party. An Incoming Shipment generally goes from a shipping address associated with the From Party to a Destination Facility. A Transfer Shipment goes between two Facilities to move inventory, equipment, etc.

Invoice & Payment

An Invoice represents a financial claim between two Parties and has details in Invoice Items to represent what the claim is for. For a Payable Invoice the To Party is always an Internal Organization and for a Receivable Invoice the From Party is an Internal Organization.

An Invoice is settled by applying a Payment or another Invoice (like a credit memo). A Credit Memo is a type of Invoice that is intended to be applied to another Invoice in lieu of payment and may be a Customer Credit Memo (payable) or a Supplier Credit Memo (receivable). The general rule for Payments and other Invoices that are applicable to an Invoice is that the From and To Parties must be reversed.

A Payment represents a transfer of funds From one Party and To another Party. An Incoming Payment is always To an Internal Organization and an Outgoing Payment is always From an Internal Organization.

Each Payment has an Instrument for how the transfer was, or will be, done. A Payment may also have From and/or To Payment Methods representing specific bank accounts, credit cards, etc that are used for the transfer of funds. A Payment only represents the transfer of funds, not the details of why funds were transfered.

A Payment may be applied to an Invoice to settle payables or receivables or to another Payment for refund of overpayment, etc.

Work Effort

A Work Effort is a task with status and/or an event with scheduled time. A Work Effort may have Child Work Efforts or a tree of Descendant Work Efforts under a single Root Work Effort (like a Project with task breakdowns).

Each Work Effort has a Purpose such as Picklist (Shipment Pick/Load/Ship), Production Run, Meeting, general Task, or more specific task like Bug Fix or New Feature.