We are currently using a label printing program called 'OE Labels'. from what I was told, that program was custom written for us by someone long before my time with this company. While we have, by now, moved away from ACCPAC Plus almost completely, this is one critical piece of software that we still rely on and haven't yet found a replacement for.

What this program does is this:

Let's say someone oder 25 pieces of a certain item. 5 of these items fit into a box/carton. The program calcucates that it is going to take 5 cartons to ship those 25 items and, therefore, prints 5 shipping labels that show a quantity of 5 pieces of this particular item (in addition to the sender's address, recipient's address etc. This program also prints '1 of 5 cartons', '2 of 5 cartons' etc. on the label, so that the recipient knows how many cartons total there are in this shipment.

Now my question: Is there anything out there that works with Adagio that will do this? If not, would it be possible to create a Crystal report that would print shipping labels with that information? Any other ideas?

Andre

Hi Andre,

OrderEntry prints shipping labels and can do the "1 of n" shipping label line. However, it does not "know" how many of an item will fit in a box, someone will have to update the shipping label count when the order is created. If they are prepared to do that, then you should be able to get the labels you need out of Adagio OrderEntry.

Am I missing something?

Perhaps you could save the number of items that fit into a box/carton as an optional unit field on the item? That could help the entry person determine the required number of labels to print.

Hi Andrew

To answer your questions, no, Adagio can't do what that custom program can do. Crystal Reports isn't a really good tool for this sort of thing, although there may be somebody out there who has the imagination and time to make it work.

As for "other ideas", Andrew's and tech support's are the best I've seen so far. Especially now that with version 8.1B you can edit the number of shipping labels on an already posted invoice.

Steve

One more thing..

You can export shipping label information, and it will export the "shipping label count" number of records for each order to feed another program.

Crystal cannot print "n" items, where "n" is read from the data file it is printing.

My question is whether the issue is the physical printing of the shipping labels, or the calculation of the number of labels to print. Adagio can do the former, not the latter.

Thanks, guys! Unfortunately, it's the latter... I know, we can tell OE to print x number of labels. It's something we'd rather not have to calculate manually - but it's not that big a deal. The more critical issue is that some vendors require us to put on the shipping label what's inside the box.
I tried to add the item number and description to the shipping label, and even though it's available in the specification list and can be added to the shipping label template - it won't print.
When I mentioned this a couple of months ago, I was told that item information can't be printed because it's not something that belongs on a shipping label. My question at that time was "Why is it selectable then?".
Anyway, if that could be changed - that would be a huge help. I mean, if I can select and add item # and item description and add it to a template - then why won't/can't it print that information. Again, I'm not a programmer - but I imagine it can't be a big deal to add that.
If we had that capability, together with being able to manually calculate how many labels we need and using the '1 of 5 cartons' print feature - I think that would work for us.
Unfortunately, our vendors require this information on the package and we have to somehow figure out how to meet their requirements.

Anyway, back to my original question: Would it be possible to print the item #/description on the label?

Thanks,

Andre

Currently, no. Labels are based on the 'header' of the document, not 'details', meaning that you can only assign a total number of labels to the entire order (or invoice). And to answer your earlier question, there is only one specification designer program (not one for labels and another for invoices), and the specification field list does not automatically hide 'unavailable' fields. This is why you can see Item Number and Description in the field list, but they are not actually used for printing labels.

There is currently no way to specify that item XXX will be packed in box #A of N. This is what would be necessary in order to be able to print item detail information onto labels; a new detail field 'Box #' or 'Label #' so that the program would know what box the item belongs to. Otherwise how would the program know which items were packed in which boxes?

And further, if enough quantity of an item is shipped to require multiple boxes, there would have to be a way of specifying multiple labels to a single detail - or if not, adding a separate order detail for each box (ie 3 lines with qty shipped 5 each, if only 5 items fit in a box).

I'll forward the suggestion to development for adding a 'label number' field to the Detail screen. It would take some serious programming to 'calculate' the total labels for a document and to print out the list of items for each label.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I now understand why I can't print the details information. The thing is that someone custom wrote such a program for us in ACCPAC Plus and we absolutely need something similar that works with Adagio.

One thing that, I think, would make the necessary calculations it a little bit easier is that we would only ship one case pack (or less) per carton. In other words, if an item has a case pack of 6, then that's what we would ship in a carton (1 case pack, containing 6 each). So, if we were to ship an order of 20 items, it would be easy (by looking at the case pack) to figure out that we would need shipping 4 labels. There would be 3 carton containing 6 individual items (1 case pack) and 1 carton containing the remaining 2 individual items.

By the way, Edisoft's Merchant software appears to have that capability. It does all the necessary calculations and prints the labels accordingly. One of the things we may have to do is to print the shipping labels for those customers that do require things like the item# and quantity on the label through Edisoft. I'm somewhat scared of allowing some of our warehouse employees to access Edisoft, but it may be the only way to get those labels printed if we ever want to retire ACCPAC.

I'll also contact Bob Wisener to see if he can and would like to custom write such a program for us. Do anyone know of anyone else who might be capable and willing to write such a program for us?

Thanks again for the feedback!

Andre

If you are looking for product labels, you might check out Lable Print from Island Micro.

This only prints one-up labels so you'll need a label printer.