3PL

3PL is the module for storing and handling a customer's goods in your warehouses for a fee, as a third-party logistics provider. It records goods coming in for a customer, keeps their stock position, moves and issues that stock, tracks the vehicles carrying it, lets you reserve incoming stock ahead of time, and bills the customer for it.

#What you can do

• Create a job to represent a piece of work for a customer, and see the receipts, issues, gate passes and billable items linked to it. See Jobs.
• Look up the stock that has come in for a customer. See Receipts (GRN).
• Look up stock that has gone out for a customer. See Issues (GIN).
• Look up stock moved between warehouses for a customer. See Transfers.
• Record a vehicle bringing stock in or taking it out, and see the stock lines it carried. See Gate Passes.
• Reserve incoming stock for a customer ahead of it arriving, and release or remove reserved items. See Reservations.
• Look up a customer's invoices and statements, and raise credit notes against them. See Invoices.
• Look up the products you hold for a customer and their stock history. See Products (Customer).
• Run the stock, activity, aging and product reports for 3PL. See Reports below.

#Access

3PL is not governed by permission groups. Any member of an organization with the 3PL module enabled can open and use every 3PL screen — creating a job, gate pass or reservation, releasing or removing a reserved item, and raising a credit note included. There is no separate View, Create, Edit, or Delete permission for 3PL itself, and no distinction between your own records and everyone else's.

Two actions reached from 3PL screens are the exception, because they submit to another module's own screen behind the scenes:

• Creating a gate pass needs the Create permission for Gate Passes in Warehouse.
• Creating and confirming a credit note needs the Create permission for Credit Notes in Finance (and, to confirm one, the auto-apply permission alongside it).

The SAP invoice export report (below) is the only 3PL report that needs a permission: the View permission for Invoices in Finance.

#The document flow

1. A job is created for a customer to represent a piece of work — receiving stock, issuing it, or both.
2. Stock coming in for the job appears as a receipt (GRN). A gate pass can record the vehicle that brought it in.
3. The customer's stock sits in your warehouses. You can reserve incoming stock for them ahead of time with a stock reservation.
4. Stock goes back out as an issue (GIN), against another gate pass for the outbound vehicle, or moves between your warehouses as a transfer.
5. The customer is billed with an invoice; a credit note can be raised against one when a discount is due.
6. Reports show the customer's stock position, activity, aging and product ledger at any point.

#Recommended setup sequence

1. Add the customers you'll be storing goods for, under CRM > Customers. See Customers.
2. Add each customer's products from the main Products screen elsewhere in OCTO Ops — 3PL has no product-creation screen of its own; see Products (Customer).
3. Set up your Warehouses — 3PL stock is held in the same warehouses as the Warehouse module.
4. Confirm the 3PL module is enabled for your organization under Module settings.
5. Start with Jobs to record a customer's first piece of work.

#Reports

The 3PL reports listed below do not appear in the Reports menu in this version, so they are opened by address rather than from the navigation — see Reports. Every report needs the 3PL module to be enabled; none of them checks a permission, except SAP invoice export, which needs the View permission for Invoices in Finance.

Most report pages use a filter drawer (the funnel icon in the toolbar) to set their filters, and results run automatically when you open the page or change a filter. Three pages have no filter drawer: Ledger and a product's own ledger detail under Products, and Availability > Product, which is reached only by opening a product's row from elsewhere and has no visible filter fields.

Every report with a results table has Copy, CSV, Excel, PDF, Print and Column visibility buttons above it; see Reports. SAP invoice export is the exception: it has no table and downloads its own Excel file formatted for SAP.

Several reports include Billable Qty (or B-Qty) columns alongside the ordinary Qty column. Billable quantity is the quantity you bill the customer for, which is not always the same as the quantity in stock.

#Current limitations

• Print does not work almost anywhere in 3PL. Job, gate pass, receipt, issue, transfer, invoice, invoice statement, and credit note profile pages all show a Print icon that leads to an error page.
• No debit notes. There is no screen or way to create one anywhere in 3PL.
• You cannot create an invoice from 3PL. Invoices can only be looked up and viewed; there is no create, preview, or CSV export screen.
• No Excel import for receipts or issues, no picking step for issues, and no way to create a transfer from this module.
• No email or print for gate passes.
• Credit notes only support one calculation model — a discount after a quantity limit is reached, for a period. There is no manual, line-item credit note in 3PL.
• Stock reservations can only reserve future, incoming stock — there is no way to reserve stock that already exists in your warehouses.
• No customer-facing (portal) 3PL pages exist in this version.