Drop-shipping is a term to describe your supplier shipping directly to your customer, rather than shipping goods to your own warehouse. The stock will never pass through your hands so no stock movements are recorded. All over Brightpearl you'll see "on order" values for inventory; this is the number of items on regular purchase orders that are still yet to be received into stock. Items on drop-ship are not included in this value.
Items on drop-ship Purchase orders, even if they are stock tracked items, are assigned a 5xxx Purchases code, since the items are never received into stock there is no asset value to receive. When you receive a purchase invoice against a drop-ship Purchase order, the net value of the items is added directly to the relevant 5xxx code.
The delivery address on a drop ship Purchase order is copied from the delivery address on the originating sale. You can of course edit this, but once a PO is set as drop-ship, you can't change it, so there's no point updating the delivery address back to your own company.
Setting Up
Setup your suppliers
Make sure that all your drop-ship suppliers are in your Brightpearl system with price list set to "cost", or their own price list if you're using lots of price lists.
Set up your products
In order to create drop-ship Purchase orders from the Goods-out screen, you need to assign your products to suppliers.
All items you wish to add to a purchase order need to have already been created as products in Brightpearl. You can exit a Purchase Order at any time to create a new product and then return to the order to add it.
Learn more about creating & editing products
Create a Drop-ship Purchase Order
You will need to have Part-Fulfilment feature activated to use this method, go to Setup > Products/Inventory > Inventory Settings.
From the sale edit screen, click the part-fulfil option. You'll be taken to the Goods-Out screen where you can choose which supplier you want to fulfil the items from. You can create multiple purchase orders in one go, for each item, if you select multiple suppliers.
Again, the important bit to make the Purchase Orders "drop-ship" is to select to deliver to the customer address. Once you process the screen, the purchase order(s) will be created.
Since the customer is now due to get the stock, Brightpearl considers this sale fulfilled.
Which orders are drop-ship?
You can see a "drop ship" column in the Purchase Order listing, and filter the list to show just drop ship orders if you want. When you're in the Purchase Order screen, you can see a message to indicate that the PO is set as drop-ship.
