Improvements for Shipments

[SchrodingersGat]

Discussed in #9669

^{Originally posted by zsoden May 17, 2025}
Hi all,

Firstly let me say just how impressive Inventree is. The developers have done a truly fantastic job thus far!

I own a small electronics manufacturing business and we're currently evaluating Inventree as an upgrade from our existing, limited, self-made system. Thus far it's really promising: we can customise Inventree to cover most requirements and will build a plugin or two for some additional functionality (most notable is the ability to take a photo of stock using a webcam during receipt of the stock).

A lot of the items on our list of limitations from the evaluation thus far has been related to the shipments functionality. If I've misunderstood any of the existing functionality please let me know!

1. We find it typical that a shipment to a customer contains product from multiple customer POs (so multiple Sales Orders in Inventree). It seems that the shipments system has been designed as a subset of the sales orders but in my mind the shipments should be split out into a separate functionality (i.e. another page under the Sales menu). Each shipment would have a globally unique ID, instead of the ID that is unique within the Sales Order. So when a Sales Order line is shipped you have the option of using an existing shipment that could have been created in another Sales Order.
2. A shipment needs to have a "shipment method" field, which is a list of items such as

• Customer collect
• Standard Post
• Express Post
• Fedex TNT

3. Point 2 combined with the tracking number can be used to create a link to the tracking from the shipment page. We've found this immensely useful in our existing system.
4. We've found that it's typically possible to determine the shipment method simply by scanning the corresponding barcode on the TNT address label or Express Post bag. So the ideal workflow is to simply scan the barcode and have the system automatically select the shipment method. It probably makes the most sense for this to be a plugin, since it's very custom behaviour.

Depending on how difficult it is I'd be happy to have one of my developers contribute to this functionality.

Edit: One other advantage of shipments handled separately that I forgot to add is that they could have Extra Line Items for those things that you would like to add to a shipment packing list but don't want to create a part for (i.e. we're sending the customer a sample of a non-stock item).

[matmair]

This sounds like a good idea in general. Before your dev starts building this out we should make sure that the data model is sketched out completely.

IMO the following should be considered:

• tree relations between shipments (if material runs low)
• generic states (so users can extend them
• metadata support
• a generic field or FG for tracking (with states)
• Assigning responsibilities

Nice to haves:

• support for events
• support for shipping costs
• nice ui interactions regarding addresses (creating a new customer address from a shipment, changing an address when shipments fail)

@SchrodingersGat already mentioned that migrations and ui interaction needs to be considered - that is a MUST in my eye.
Not sure in which app shipments make sense. Probably order.

[zsoden]

Thanks @SchrodingersGat and @matmair.

As mentioned in the discussion I'm happy to sponsor this feature if our further evaluation over the next week or two proves that Inventree is the correct upgrade path for us to take. Ultimately there are costs for us to switch to any new inventory management system, regardless of whether it's open source or not. To me however, the value of open source is that it gives us full control of deployment and the ability to tweak in-house without the high costs of external consultants.

My dev can definitely contribute (he's mostly React based) but I have started to think that such significant work to the core system probably needs to be primarily done by you guys?

Support for shipping costs
In our use case this would be as simple as a field where the user enters the shipping cost of the shipment. We print two packing lists: one that ships with the shipment and one that is handed to our admin for invoicing to the customer (invoicing is emailed separate to the shipment). Only the latter list includes any pricing or shipping costs.

Nice ui interactions regarding addresses
Yes, the ability to add a new shipping address would be great. There is another scenario though where a customer might want you to ship to a random one-off address (say, direct to an end customer). In our existing system we have the ability to type in an address that is saved in and used only for that shipment. It overrides the customer's saved addresses for that shipment only.

Responsibility
At the level we're discussing now I don't think a particular responsible person is required for the shipments. But it would make sense to include this functionality for consistency and for potential future extension of the responsibility functionality (i.e. sending a notification to a user when a shipment is ready to ship).

Who is the best person to speak privately with regarding sponsoring?

[matmair]

My dev can definitely contribute (he's mostly React based) but I have started to think that such significant work to the core system probably needs to be primarily done by you guys?

That depends if the dev wants to work with Django, our project is not immensely complex if one follows the existing code and django best practices

Who is the best person to speak privately with regarding sponsoring?

You can reach out to support AT inventree DOT com or code AT mjmair DOT com

[zsoden]

@matmair his Django experience is almost zero but he'll take a loser look at the code and see if he's comfortable giving it a crack.

[matmair]

@zsoden sounds great. Please tell them to reach out here or via the mail addresses provided above to make sure the thing they end up building is reviewable/mergeable

[matmair]

@zsoden i am trying to sketch out some work packages for the next while. Has there been any decision on InvenTree and dev/sponsorship of this feature?

[zsoden]

@matmair I've sent you an email to discuss further.