Rental Shipment

The document recording equipment going out from your yard. Created from a Rental Order, then posted when the equipment physically ships.

How it fits in

A Rental Shipment is the document where the operational fact of the equipment leaving your yard gets recorded. The Rental Order says "this customer is renting this equipment from these dates"; the Shipment says "and here is the kit, going out today, against that order".

Shipments come in two states. While you're preparing a shipment (deciding which lines to ship, in what quantities, from which bin or container) it's a Rental Shipment Order: editable, queued, not yet recorded. Once everything's ready you Post the shipment, which freezes it as a Posted Shipment Order: immutable, with all the line-level traceability back to the originating Rental Order.

A single Rental Order can produce several Shipments (you might ship some equipment now and the rest a week later). Each Shipment carries its own header and lines, all linked back to the same Rental Order via the Linked to Rental Order No. field.

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A Rental Shipment is distinct from BC's standard Sales Shipment. The Rental Shipment is the working document for the equipment-going-out flow specific to rentals; standard Sales Shipments are still produced for non-rental sales.

How a Shipment Order gets created

There are three paths to a new Rental Shipment Order, depending on where you start and how much you want to combine.

Path 1: from the Rental Order lines subpage (most common). Open the Rental Order, select the line or lines you want to ship in the Lines subpage, and use the Ship action from the subpage's menu. A new Rental Shipment Order opens, prepopulated with just the selected lines. This is the typical day-to-day workflow when you're shipping equipment for a specific order.

Path 2: from the Rental Order header. Use the Create Shipment Order action on the Rental Order's ribbon. A new (empty) Rental Shipment Order opens; use Get Source Documents on the unposted Shipment Order to pull lines in from the originating Rental Order. Useful when you want to start the Shipment Order before deciding which lines to include.

Path 3: standalone from the Shipment Orders list. Open the Rental Shipment Orders list, create a new Shipment Order from there, and use Get Source Documents to pull lines from one or more Rental Orders. Useful when you're consolidating a single shipment across multiple Rental Orders going to the same customer or destination on the same day.

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Shipping a kit: on Path 1, you only need to select the kit's parent line. The kit's component lines (Items, Rental Items, Resources) ship automatically alongside the parent. The same applies to structured Rental Item Types whose lines have been broken into components.
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One-time Invoice Lines do not go through Shipment. Lines on the Rental Order's One-time Invoice Lines subpage (shipping charges, fuel, sundries, anything billed flat) are not part of the Shipment flow. They go straight to invoicing alongside the rental lines that have been shipped. Don't expect to see them on a Shipment Order.

Open vs Posted

The same data lives on two pages depending on lifecycle state:

Rental Shipment Order (open): editable. Used while you're preparing a shipment. Lines can be added, quantities adjusted, bin and container assignments made. Posting moves it to the next state.

Posted Shipment Order: immutable. The historical record of what was shipped, with each posted line carrying a link back to the originating Rental Line on the Rental Order. Used for traceability and for printing the Shipment Manifest after the fact.

The two pages have the same FastTab layout (General and Shipping); the differences are in the line columns and the available actions. Both are documented below.

Header fields (Open and Posted)

The header carries the document identity and shipping address. Open and Posted have the same field set; on Posted, all fields are read-only.

General

General
No.required
Auto-assigned from the No. Series defined in Rental Setup. On the Posted variant, it's the posted document number from a separate posted-document No. Series.
Customer No.
The customer the equipment is going out to. Inherited from the originating Rental Order.
Customer Name
Defaults from the Customer card via the Rental Order; editable on the open Shipment Order.
Posting Date
The date the shipment is posted to the ledger. Defaults to the work date on the open Shipment Order; locked on the Posted variant.
Linked to Rental Order No.
The Rental Order this Shipment is being posted against. The link drives line-by-line traceability and is the way you navigate from a Posted Shipment back to the originating Order.
Project No.
Inherited from the Rental Order if the Order is linked to a Project.

Shipping

Shipping
Shipment Method Code
How the equipment is going out (delivery, customer collection, courier). Inherited from the Rental Order; editable on the open Shipment Order.
Ship-to Contact
The named contact at the customer who is receiving the shipment.
Ship-to Code
A named alternate Ship-to address registered against the customer; blank if shipping to the customer's main address.
Ship-to Name, Name 2
The recipient name on the shipment label.
Ship-to Address, Address 2, City, County, Post Code
The actual destination address. Inherited from the Rental Order's Ship-to fields; editable on the open Shipment Order if the address needs adjusting for this specific shipment.

FactBoxes (right-side panel)

Both the open and posted Shipment pages show the Attachments, Links, and Notes FactBoxes in the right-side panel. Attachments holds document files (including photos); Links holds record links to related pages or URLs; Notes holds free-text notes against the document.

The Lines section (Open)

Lines on the open Shipment Order are the equipment items queued to ship. Each line has a Quantity (how much in total this line represents), a Quantity to Ship (how much you're going to ship in this posting), and a Quantity Shipped (how much has already been shipped against this line). Together they let you ship in batches: queue up a quantity, post, queue up the rest, post again.

The line list uses the same emphasis as the Rental Order lines so the document structure reads at a glance: Rental Item Type and Resource Group placeholder lines are shown in bold, and a Kit header line is shown in bold blue. Plain item, rental item, and resource lines use the normal weight.

Open Shipment Lines
Line Type
What the line is shipping: Item, Rental Item, Rental Item Type, Resource, etc. Same line type set as the Rental Order.
No.
The identifier of the item, type, or resource being shipped.
Description, Description 2
Inherited from the source line on the Rental Order; editable on the open Shipment Order if you need to annotate the shipment specifically.
Location
The location (depot, yard) the line is shipping from.
Quantity
The total quantity this line represents from the Rental Order.
Quantity to Ship
How much you're going to ship in the next Post action. Defaults to whatever's left to ship; reduce it when you only want to ship part now.
Quantity Shipped
How much has already been shipped against this line in earlier postings. Read-only.
Bin
The bin the equipment is being picked from. Defaults from the line's Location, but can be overridden if you're picking from a non-default bin.
Container, Sub Container
Optional grouping fields for warehouses that organise stock into containers within bins. Useful for finding a specific item in a complex warehouse layout.

The Lines section (Posted)

Posted Shipment lines are read-only. They look similar to the open lines but the Quantity-to-Ship/Shipped pair collapses to a single Quantity (the amount that was shipped at posting time), and two trace-back fields appear:

Posted Shipment Lines
Line Type, No., Description, Description 2
As recorded at the moment of posting; immutable.
Location, Bin, Container
Where the equipment was picked from at posting time.
Quantity
The quantity that was actually shipped in this posting (was Quantity to Ship at the moment of posting).
Linked to Rental Order
The Rental Order document number this posted line came from. Together with Linked to Rental Line, gives you exact traceability from a Posted Shipment back to the originating Rental Order line.
Linked to Rental Line
The line number on the originating Rental Order.

Allocating placeholder lines before posting

A Rental Item Type line is a placeholder: it says "any 10-tonne digger" rather than naming a specific machine. A Resource Group line works the same way for labour. Before such a line can ship, it has to be resolved to a specific Rental Item (or a specific Resource), so the posted shipment and the rental order both record exactly which unit went out. You can do that allocation straight from the Shipment Order; you don't have to go back to the Rental Order.

Allocate / Unallocate (on the shipment line). Select a Rental Item Type or Resource Group line in the Shipment Lines, open the line's Functions menu (under the Line group), and use Allocate. A picker opens: the Rental Items list filtered to that type for a Rental Item Type line, or the Resource list filtered to that group for a Resource Group line. Pick the unit and it's written back to the line here and to the linked rental order line in one step, so the order stays in step with what you're actually shipping. If Auto Reservation is on in Rental Setup, the allocation also reserves the chosen unit for the rental dates. Unallocate reverses it: the line drops back to the Rental Item Type or Resource Group, and any reservation the allocation took is released.

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Allocate and Unallocate only act on a line that hasn't shipped yet (Quantity Shipped is zero). Once a line has been posted, its allocation is fixed; correct a mis-allocation by cancelling the posted line instead. Bulk Rental Item Types can't be allocated this way yet.

Scan & Allocate (on the shipment header). For a faster pick, use the Scan & Allocate action on the Shipment Order ribbon. It opens a scan dialog listing every Rental Item Type line on this shipment still waiting to be allocated; scan or type a unit's No. or Serial No. and the matching line is resolved to that unit on the spot, with a running count and a per-scan result. See Scan & Allocate for the full workflow.

Posting with placeholder lines: the guard

Because a placeholder line can't physically ship, posting checks for them and stops you shipping equipment that hasn't been pinned to a real unit.

A placeholder you're trying to ship blocks the post. If any line with Quantity to Ship greater than zero is still an unallocated Rental Item Type or Resource Group, posting errors and names the line. Allocate every such line (Allocate, or Scan & Allocate) and post again.

A placeholder you're leaving behind asks first. On a partial shipment, you might have placeholder lines set to ship nothing this time (Quantity to Ship is zero). Posting doesn't block on those, but it warns: it lists the unallocated lines being left behind and asks you to confirm. Say Yes to post the lines that are ready and leave the placeholders on the order for a later shipment; say No to go back and allocate them first.

Walkthrough: shipping a partial quantity

A common case: a Rental Order has an item with Quantity = 10, but you only have 6 units ready to ship today. You want to ship the 6 now and the remaining 4 next week. Walkthrough uses Path 1 (line-subpage Ship); the same logic applies on the other paths.

1
Select the line on the Rental Order

Open the Rental Order, find the line for the item in question on the Lines subpage, and select it. (For kits or structured types, select the parent line; the components come with it.)

2
Use Ship from the line menu

Open the Lines subpage's action menu and use Ship. A new Rental Shipment Order opens, prepopulated with the selected line. Quantity to Ship defaults to the full outstanding quantity (10 units in this example).

3
Reduce Quantity to Ship to what you actually have

On the Shipment Order's Lines, set Quantity to Ship to 6 for the line in question. Quantity stays at 10 (that's what the order is for); Quantity to Ship is just what this posting will record.

4
Post the Shipment

Use the Post Shipment action. The Shipment Order becomes a Posted Shipment Order recording 6 units shipped. The originating Rental Line's Quantity Shipped goes up by 6, and Quantity to Ship on the Rental Line is now 4.

5
Ship the rest later

When the remaining 4 units are ready, repeat the process: select the line, Ship, post. The Rental Line is now fully shipped.

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The document-level Ship All action on the Rental Order ribbon does the same thing in one go for every line: it ships every line's outstanding Quantity to Ship and posts. Use it when you genuinely are shipping the whole order at once; use Path 1 (per-line Ship) when you want more control.

Cancelling a shipment

A posted Shipment can be cancelled from two places, depending on whether you want to cancel one line or several. Both paths reverse the posting via a corrective ledger entry rather than deleting the posted record.

Path 1: from the Rental Order line. Open the originating Rental Order, find the relevant line on the Lines subpage, and use the Cancel Shipment action from the line menu. The cancellation reverses the posting for that line, regardless of which Posted Shipment Order it was originally on. Quickest path when you know which Rental Order line is wrong.

Path 2: from the Posted Shipment Order. Open the Posted Shipment Order, select one or more lines you want to cancel on the Lines subpage, and use the Cancel Shipment action from the subform's line menu. Useful when you want to cancel specific lines out of a multi-line posted shipment without affecting the rest.

A document-level Cancel Document action on the Posted Shipment Order's ribbon (to cancel the whole posted Shipment in one go) is coming soon; for now, cancel by line using either path above.

Actions on the open Shipment Order

Get Source Documents: pull lines onto this Shipment Order from one or more Rental Orders. Useful when you're combining shipments across multiple Orders going to the same customer on the same day.

Scan & Allocate: open the scan dialog to resolve this shipment's Rental Item Type lines to specific Rental Items by scanning units. Covered above under Allocating placeholder lines.

Post Shipment: post the Shipment Order. Creates the Posted Shipment Order, updates the originating Rental Lines' Quantity Shipped, and reserves or releases stock as appropriate. The open Shipment Order is consumed by the post. Posting is blocked if any line being shipped is still an unallocated placeholder, and warns if a partial post leaves placeholder lines behind (see the guard above).

Line > Functions > Allocate / Unallocate: per-line actions on the Shipment Lines that resolve a Rental Item Type or Resource Group line to a specific Rental Item or Resource, or reverse it. Covered above under Allocating placeholder lines.

Post and Print: post the Shipment, then immediately print the Shipment Manifest.

Post and Email: post the Shipment, then email the Shipment Manifest to the customer.

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Record links, notes, and document attachments (including photos) on the open Shipment Order are carried onto the Posted Shipment Order when you post. Earlier releases kept the attachments but lost the links and notes, because shipments are not archived.

Actions on the Posted Shipment Order

Cancel Document (coming soon): a document-level reverse of the whole posted shipment. Not yet implemented. To cancel a posted shipment today, use the line-level Cancel Shipment actions instead (from the Rental Order line or the Posted Shipment Order lines, both covered above under Cancelling a shipment).

Print Shipment Manifest: re-print the Shipment Manifest for this posted shipment. Use after the fact if the customer needs another copy of what was sent.

Email Shipment Manifest: email the Shipment Manifest for this posted shipment to the customer as an attachment. The standalone counterpart to Print Shipment Manifest, for when the manifest is needed after the shipment was already posted.

Line-level actions

On the Posted Shipment lines, one line-level action is available:

Cancel Shipment: cancel the posting of an individual posted line, rather than the whole shipment. Use when only one line was posted in error.

Related pages