I’m evaluating Dolibarr to use it in a constructioncompany.
In our company the custumer buyes a building for a fixed price. In the moment I sell the building I don’t know the exact amount of materials/products we have to deliver. I mostly know it after the engineering.
But sometimes I have to deliver in addition some screws or something like that.
My plan was to create a project linked with one sales order “1 Building price 100.000” and then i thought I create as many delivery notes as needed also linked to this project. Is there a possibility to create delivery notes without a sales order?
Or is there a documentation for the “Engineer to Order” workflow in Dolibarr?
for the second part of your question the solution is to activate and use the modul “Advanced Stock Transfer”.
For the first part please follow the discussion here
There’s a few different ways you can try to put it together. If you are creating delivery notes without a sales order then the best way in Dolibarr that I have settled on is to use that Advanced Stock Transfer functionality as DG-Rilling said.
In this kind of workflow, “Delivery notes” are specifically only final products, and any non-billed items (that should still be tracked) are managed by removing the items from inventory without sales order, instead with a inventory shipping document. As an example, for my dental lab after the changes I can more effectively track orders that have been sent for a test fit using advanced stock transfer and by having the “product” be actually multiple products (e.g. Product-S1, Product-S2, and Product, to track the manufacturing of each stage), and then once they are returned for completion I make the final delivery note from the sales order. Then, once every 2 weeks we can roll up all current Sales Orders and generate the invoices. It sounds like a lot, but using Robot Framework to automate a lot of this made it very simple.
You could also go “down” a level in your tracking, where the project is your “top level” order that you receive, and you generate sales orders and delivery notes for each aspect for the product that’s delivered, and generate an invoice in the end, but since you are doing these for a fixed cost it may or may not make sense.
The advantage of Dolibarr is that it’s (relatively) easy to customize certain features or add additional tracking with the use of Complimentary Attributes, not to mention its free, but the disadvantage is that documentation of specific use cases is lacking - mostly trial/error playing around with the software. If you have any other questions or details you’re welcome to ask, and when you settle on your workflow (if its Dolibarr) I recommend you share the high-level overview for others. I’ll be doing the same with my dental lab workflow soon once its been settled
