Hi,

I had found this on the old forum:

http://www.linnsystems.com/supportforum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=6169

and I would love to talk to Gurner about the system he has in place? or if anyone else has a workaround for this?

thanks

I'm still here....but unfortunately, the workaround to your problem does not involve using Linnworks :-(

Hi Rob,

Thank you for the reply. I understand that sadly it does not involve linnworks.....I seriously think they are missing a trick. If they had added this function while increasing prices.... I seriously think a lot more customers would have stayed and continue to stay.

Could I ask about your work around? I believe it involves MS Access?

thanks

Yes, it involves MS Access .... when Linnworks announced their "exciting price restructuring", rather than sticking with how it used to be LW->Access (with Access being used for sequential renumbering for VAT invoicing)   I  spent a bit of time (understatement!) to replace Linnworks in my flow/chain by coding/beefing up the Access part of things ...I'm solely on Access now (but still keeping my Linnworks account alive...albeit not used much nowadays)

 

Linnworks has personally let me down big time, I got told you can get a custom script for VAT invoices ect , so of course I signed up with the new pricing. Once I got in touch with script team they confirm it's not possible... sales people are still saying it is. never mind.

 

So ultimately it looks like I am going have to go down this route. I have little experience of MS Access and no knowledge of API for selling platforms and Royal Mail OBA.

 

So I was going to set up an MS Access to not call this information automatically, while I still have linnworks going. I just want to set up a system to get the VAT invoice sequential renumbering for the UK and DE VAT, then automatically email the invoices out.

 

Have you just got the one database? then running forms (for invoicing) from there and using VBA for the renumbering?

 

At present, I have a very long winded excel workaround but it is way too much manual input

 

thanks

The solution is not trivial.

To be able to use a system for VAT invoicing you have to know where an order was fulfilled from (the last time I asked, LW did not capture this information)....for example if you're a UK seller & send stock to to an Amazon Fulfilment centre...you are liable for German VAT.....therefore you need to capture where something was fulfilled from. You can'[t just use a blunt rule that "if the Source is Amazon.de, then the VAT code is xxxx" ....well not if you are both self fulfilling & using FBA.

Parking that aside, what you seek (sequential numbering) can be done in MS Access, but you'd still need to know a lot about SQL scripts (to get the data out of Linnworks) & then a fair bit about MS access (to initially get the data in...& then maniuplating it) ......actually, having MS access renumber Invoice numbers sequentially is quite trivial, but creating an invoice isn't (it involves all aspects of the suite of available options...databases, queries, reports & sub reports)

My plan was to manually download reports direct from selling platforms (not using linnworks to download any reports, only using linnworks to process orders, print postage, submit manifest and to mark items as dispatched).

Feed these reports into the database in MS Access, using forms to produce invoices and coding for the IF statements for VAT numbers.

Would I assume you only have one database? unless you have a database for each selling platform?

Then before its time to renew linnworks to get API for selling platforms, royal mail ect all set up

Why would you want to labouriously go to each selling channel & download the reports...LW has essentially done that for you (by way of fetching in all your sales orders) ...all you need to do is export from Linnworks using an SQL script. Then import that into Access.