I’m hoping someone can help us with a workflow hang-up we’ve run into several times. We are a contractor supply store and often place custom orders for customers or drop ship and/or ship material from our location to a jobsite.
When we custom order products, we pass the our vendor’s shipping cost along to the customer unless we can add it to one of our normal stocking orders.
When we drop ship, we add the shipping expense to the Sales Order.
When we ship from here, whether it’s using the UPS integration within Acumatica or LTL freight, we add that expense to the Sales Order.
What is the recommended workflow from Acumatica or something that works for YOUR company for charging customers before the exact shipping amount is known?
I see a “create pre-payment” button next to the “create payment” button, and when we create payments there are options for “authorize” and “capture.” My understanding of these 4 is as follows -
“create pre-payment” - pulls partial funding to be used toward the order total
“create payment” - is complete payment for the full order
“capture” - is the process of sending a signal to the CC processor (we use Acumatica Payments/Fortis) to collect payment
“authorize” - is the process of creating a record of a given dollar amount that the customer is okay with spending, but it does NOT charge the card yet
So… would it make sense for us to “authorize” a payment of the order cost + expected shipping? If we do that, what is the workflow to go back and actually capture the correct payment once the shipping expenses are finalized?
Thank you for your help!