Customer Balances
An integral feature of TrackAbout is to track and maintain Customer balances. As your assets are scanned to and from Customers, TrackAbout will adjust those balances accordingly.
Bulk Load Customer Balances
Many clients choose to load their existing Customer Balances prior to beginning Delivery with TrackAbout. TrackAbout Support can bulk load this information for you. To do this, they'll need the following information:
This file contains the current asset balances/counts for customers. Typically this is the data for the start/end of a month.
File Loading: This file is loaded by TrackAbout support.
| Field | Example | Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Number | 123456 | Text, Max 30 char | This is the full customer number. It can contain numbers, letters and special characters. |
| Product Code | AC100 | Text, Max 52 char | This is commonly called the Item Number (or Part Number, or Stock Number, or Gas Code). If this code is broken into two parts, both parts are needed here. |
| Current Balance | 5 | Integer | Number of assets of this type with this customer. Negative balances are OK for Exchange type assets. |
Indicate in the name of the file the date that this file is accurate. This is typically the start or end of a month. So a good name for this file would be CylinderBalances_EndofFeb2010.txt
If a customer has multiple Product Codes, then repeat the Customer Number on each line. So a simple example might look like:
123456 AC100 5
123456 OX100 3
129999 AC100 2
131212 NI300 2
131212 OX100 1
Feature: Parent / Child Not Scanned Asset Pooling
NOTE
This feature is disabled by default and needs to be turned on by TrackAbout Support.
This feature allows clients to apply returns from a related customer that would normally result in a no credit return. This way, the balance from the parent customer's perspective is correct.
When an in-house unique asset is returned from a customer, we check to see if the customer has any matching Deliver Not Scanned (DNS) which could be consumed by the return. When this feature is disabled, if no DNS is found on the return customer then we attach a "Returned Asset Not on Balance" no-credit exception to the asset on the record.
With this feature enabled, instead of immediately creating the no-credit return, we first look to all related customers to see if any of them have a positive matching DNS balance we could consume. (A related customer is any holder with the same parent as the original return customer.) If an eligible related customer is found to take credit for the return, then we do three things:
-
Create a "Return Credit Given to Related Customer" exception on the original delivery record, pointing to the related customer which got credit.
-
Create a new Return Credit Accounting Adjustment record for the related customer and attach the returned unique asset to it. This will generate a Fixed DNS exception consuming the DNS from the related customer.
-
Create a Failed RNS on the original delivery record, marking it as non-retriable.
This feature also works with DNS consumption of related types (full/empty/generic product codes), so, for example, a full unique returned from Customer 1 could be credited by reducing the DNS quantity of the corresponding empty product code on Customer 2.
In regards to which accounts the DNS are removed from first: The logic removes the oldest DNS it can find, based on how the system is configured for "Maximum Days to Look Back". After that point, it is randomly picked.
