After several years of working as a warehouse management system, I was transferred to work as a supply chain billing system. I have been working for two or three years now. I have encountered various demands and problems, and also gained some experience. As the saying goes, "No progress without summary. Before I forget all about it, I will quickly summarize it. From today on, I will talk about settlement.".

1、 What

Business background: A specialized supply chain enterprise provides warehousing, transportation and distribution (express delivery) services for customers. The main service object is e-commerce enterprises. Customers store the goods to be sold in a third-party warehouse. The other party is responsible for inventory management and daily order receipt and shipment. Both parties settle monthly. The goal is to systematically calculate various revenues and expenditures, as follows:

The settlement between the two parties is usually monthly. The settlement of the previous month is completed at the beginning of the next month. At the beginning of the month, the settlement staff checks and exports the bill. The customer confirms the payment and completes the payment. The core work of this is to calculate expenses and generate bills. The later data analysis is completed on this basis. The following will specifically talk about what problems we encountered and how to solve them.

2、 Why

In recent years, e-commerce has developed rapidly, and various brands and commodities have started to sell online. In order to increase sales, enterprises will distribute goods on various e-commerce platforms, carry out multi-channel sales, place orders online on multiple platforms, and deliver goods offline in a centralized manner. E-commerce business orders are frequent and time sensitive, requiring special order and warehousing systems, This kind of system mainly solves the problems of order process management and on-site warehouse operation, including commodity warehousing management and inventory management.

Because there are many links in e-commerce back-end logistics, each part of logistics business involves a lot of manpower and material resources, whether it is warehouse in/out management, transportation between multiple places, or express door-to-door delivery. Whether it is self built warehouse team operation, or warehouse logistics outsourcing, it is necessary to accurately calculate the corresponding costs according to the actual business, Finally, the profit can be clearly known through the difference between sales and cost.

Take third-party warehousing for example, there are many warehousing logistics links, each link will produce different billing items, and each billing item will have a variety of billing rules, such as goods warehousing, which will involve unloading, counting, pasting bar codes, quality inspection, packaging replacement and other operations. Different operations correspond to the corresponding charging items, and each charging item may contain a variety of billing rules, Our common charging rules for warehousing operation fees may include charging by the number of containers, charging by weight, and charging by volume, which will respectively involve the total number of containers, total weight, and total volume of inbound goods,

With the continuous development of business, the number of billing items is increasing, and the billing rules are evolving. Calculating the logistics costs of many users in different business forms is a tedious and complex task. If you use the information system to solve the problem, you can do more.

Now let's see how the system works.

3、 How

1. What is the charge

We start from business. The business mainly includes warehousing, transportation and distribution. Each business will have different billing items and rules, such as:

Warehousing: the customer stores the goods in a third-party warehouse, and the warehouse will charge according to different links. When the goods are warehoused, the warehouse operation fee will be charged; In case of the need to paste barcode and change package, value-added service fees will be charged for pasting barcode and changing package; In addition, if the goods are stored in the warehouse, storage fees will be charged according to the amount and time of storage; After the e-commerce platform generates an order, the warehousing enterprise will collect the order operation fee from the warehouse and deliver goods for consumers according to the order requirements; After picking, the goods are packaged into packages and delivered to the courier for delivery to the consumers, which will generate express delivery fees. This has already belonged to the distribution business line.

2. How to charge

After understanding the business, we also have a general understanding of the fees that will be charged for the corresponding business. Next, we will study how to calculate these fees.

Take the "warehousing operation fee" in the warehousing phase as an example. The actual warehousing operation fee is charged according to the number of warehousing pieces, that is, n yuan/piece, depending on the customer or commodity; For the scenario of batch full in and full out, the charges will be based on the number of containers received, that is, n yuan/container; There is also a charge by weight, n yuan/ton or n yuan/kg; For some goods with small weight and large volume, they will also be charged by volume, that is, n yuan/square meter.

After a general understanding of what and how to charge, let's look at how to use the system to link the links:

To put it simply, cost=quantity * unit price. To calculate a certain cost, first take the corresponding business data. We extract the data completed by the job from each business system, match the corresponding contract unit price according to the business type corresponding to the data, and then multiply the quantity by the unit price to calculate the corresponding cost. Let's take a specific example.

Let's take the warehousing operation fee as an example. First, we extract some warehousing document data from the warehousing system, as shown in the following table:

We see that the receipt order includes the receipt order number, the corresponding customer, the warehouse, as well as the specific goods received and the receipt quantity. The receipt order in the figure above has received two kinds of goods, with a total quantity of 500. In fact, combining the commodity data, we can further calculate the total number of containers corresponding to the current document. If the container specification is 10 pieces/container, the total number of containers is 50, The total weight and volume can also be calculated, which is the weight or volume of a single box multiplied by the total number of boxes, so that our business data is almost ready. We know that this receipt order actually has two kinds of goods, 500 boxes in total, and the total number of boxes is 50. The total weight and total volume are also available.

Second, we checked the contract quotation of this customer, and we recorded the quotation in the system, as shown in the following table:

We see that in the contract quotation of this customer, the warehousing operation fee is charged by the box. The price varies in different regions. Beijing is 0.9 yuan/box, and Shanghai is 0.8 yuan/box. With the quotation, we also clarified the charging rules, namely:

Cost=total number of inbound containers * unit price of containers

Step 3, we can calculate the cost. In the example, the receipt order totally receives 50 cases to the warehouse in Shanghai, and the unit price is 0.8 yuan/case. The operation cost of this receipt is 50 * 0.8=40 yuan.

Taking the warehousing operation fee in the warehousing phase as an example, we briefly described the calculation process. The cost calculation process in other phases is also similar. In fact, we will encounter many relatively complex scenarios, which will correspond to some specific charging rules. For example, the express fee is generally charged by the weight of the package, which is shipped from Shanghai to Hangzhou:

Rule A: 8 yuan will be charged for each kilogram within 3 kilograms. If the weight exceeds 3 kilograms, 7 yuan will be charged for the first kilogram, and 2 yuan will be added for each additional kilogram; Rule B: 8 yuan if the weight is less than 3 kg, 10 yuan if the weight is 3-5 kg, and 1.5 yuan if the weight is more than 5 kg.

This is what we call the charging rule. Different rules for receipt operation fees are different units. Here, the weight ladder is different. The rule is the logic of calculation. The rule is expressed in a table template, which we call the quotation template. We will discuss the details in the following chapters.

To sum up, we do this:

The first step is to extract business data; Step 2: customize the billing template and enter the contract quotation; Step 3: Calculate the fees according to the charging rules corresponding to the template, that is, take the corresponding business data, cooperate with the contract quotation, and calculate the fees according to the established rules.

After the cost is calculated, the customer summarizes the monthly cost data to form a bill. After the bill is checked and confirmed by both parties, the invoicing and payment collection process can be started. The entire settlement is completed when the payment collection is completed. There are many billing items in different links of logistics business warehousing, transportation, and distribution, corresponding to many billing rules, Each rule corresponds to a different billing scenario. We will discuss some details later. That's all for today's introduction. I hope this section is useful to you!

This article was originally published by @ Jiaye, and everyone is a product manager. Reproduction is prohibited without permission

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