Send a day's orders as one delivery

A wholesaler charges carriage per delivery. Send six customers’ garments as six orders and you pay carriage six times, on orders that would have cleared the minimum together.

So orders going to a wholesaler are not sent one at a time. Supplier orders groups what is waiting by the day it arrived, totals each day against the figure your own account uses, and sends the day as a single order with every customer inside it.

What a day tells you

Each day heading carries three things: how many orders are under it, what they cost you before VAT, and whether that has reached your free carriage figure or how far short it is.

The figure is yours, typed on the supplier’s settings. PenCarrie publish 175 net for orders placed online, and a negotiated account can differ, so the plugin never assumes one. Leave it empty and the day still totals; it simply watches nothing.

A day you have finished with folds away. Anything ticked inside stays ticked while it is folded, because a fold is a way of looking rather than a way of choosing.

What it costs you, and when that price was set

The cost shown is the trade cost, never what your customer paid.

Where a cost was recorded at the moment of sale, that is the one used. Where none was, the price comes from your supplier’s catalogue at today’s rates, for the quantity on the order and the rung that quantity reaches: six of something is priced as six, not as six singles. The screen says which of the two you are looking at, because catalogue prices move and an order from last month was not bought at today’s rates.

Where neither exists, it says the cost is not known rather than showing a figure it cannot stand behind.

Proving you are connected

Ordering rides on PenCarrie approving your account’s address and customer code together, which is a separate approval from the one that reads their stock. Check the connection, on the supplier’s settings, asks their system to list the orders on your account: one press proves your details are approved without building anything. Nothing is ordered and nothing is reserved. An account with no orders on it yet answers as connected, and a refusal names both causes in the order worth checking.

Sending the day

Tick a day, or tick orders across days, and the bar at the bottom totals what you have chosen. Review the order opens what is about to be sent: one line per product code, with the customers sharing that line named underneath.

Two customers who bought the same garment in the same size become one line. That is how a wholesaler’s order works, so each line carries a reference naming the customers on it, and the full breakdown goes on the order comment. Both print on the despatch note, so the paperwork in the box tells you whose is whose.

Nothing is placed. What SupplierBoss builds is an order left unconfirmed on your account, which you sign in and place yourself once you have looked at it.

Once it is built, SupplierBoss reads the order back from PenCarrie and says what it comes to there: The order at PenCarrie comes to £59.59 before VAT. That is their figure, at your account’s prices, so it matches your PenCarrie basket. If PenCarrie give no figure, the line says the total is an estimate: Goods about £65.70 before VAT, at list prices. Your own prices may be lower.

The plugin cannot place an order with your supplier. It builds one and leaves it for you. That is not a setting you can turn off, and there is no button anywhere that completes an order at the supplier's end.

When part of a day cannot go

Suppliers hold stock, and stock moves between your last feed and your send.

A line they are short on does not land. Their answer names what they can supply, and that offer is not accepted on your behalf: an order that cannot go whole stays on your list, and nothing of it is left half sent. Where such an order shared a line with others, its share comes back off the order they went on.

An item with no supplier code cannot be sent at all. Its order stays behind, and its row says how many items could not go and why.

A garment’s code is read from what the customer chose, whichever way the product was built: a WooCommerce variation, or a simple product carrying AddOnBoss colour and size options. A garment inside a BundleBoss bundle reaches the supplier the same way, whether the bundle is one order line or split into a line per item, and the print positions chosen for it stay on its line. A printed job with nothing chosen, such as a printer’s product inside a bundle, is refused by name rather than offered, and its row says the line goes on by hand.

Every item on the orders you chose is counted before anything is sent. If what was built does not match what those orders hold, down to the unit, the whole send stops before your supplier is contacted and tells you what did not add up. It is a check that should never fire. It exists so that a day’s work cannot quietly go short.

Stock is held while an order waits

Adding lines reserves that stock on your account, and a supplier releases unconfirmed orders after a time: PenCarrie name forty eight hours. The screen counts the hours down for you.

If you change your mind before placing it, taking an order back off removes its lines from the supplier’s order rather than leaving them reserved against a customer who is no longer in it.

Knowing it was placed

Your supplier’s system does not tell this shop when you press their button, so SupplierBoss asks. Once an hour, while an order of yours is open, it reads their order list and settles anything their own system now calls finished. Pressing I have placed it asks them too rather than taking your word for it, which matters when three of your orders are on one delivery.

What was sent is kept either way. Their site can show you the order; only this can tell you which customer each garment belonged to, which is the thing you need when the box arrives short.

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Next: sending orders to a supplier covers the waiting states and what happens when a supplier refuses one, and keeping stock right covers what your shop shows while all this is going on.