Jared Ward: 0:00

Welcome to the Product Marketing Podcast. I'm your founder, ceo, jared, and I'm here with our head of product, billy. What's going on, guys? How's it going? Okay, so we got a couple updates to give you guys.

Jared Ward: 0:08

So the assembly orders. We're just beefing up a couple things in the assembly orders, so, specifically, custom fields and alternate IDs, so this enables a lot more flexibility and overall, better record keeping. Then we also added to automations. So automations is something that we're always expanding and there's a really cool automation rule that we added for some of our customers, which is, at the receipt of inventory, you can automatically assemble based on a first bill of materials attached to the product. So this is incredibly useful for some of our customers who they purchase raw materials. They get sent to a co-manufacturer, for example in Luminous, and instead of having to go in and manually create the assembly order and complete it, now you can do this completely automatically. So if you're interested in this, just reach out to one of your account managers or reach out to supportnetcom and we can help you walk you through it.

Billy Bush: 1:00

Next, we've recently released a new report that is, inventory valuation, and this is in a. We've had some valuation reports for some time, but now we're able to better isolate, like incoming on the water, values of inventory, as opposed to just everything else that you have in production or you know different things like that that might show as incoming. Now we're able to actually see what is incoming, give it an estimated value on previous landed costs, and so you have a much more accurate picture beyond just what's on hand, which of course, is also there. You can actually see the detail on the incoming numbers you know that are on the water and separate that out. Along with that there are po shipments themselves. A report that actually gives you a roll-up total of everything on the water, and so there's there's a lot more detail to be able to get more insight into that kind of incoming number and make sure that that is properly shown in your valuations.

Jared Ward: 1:50

This was such a big update because if you've ever closed the books as a e-commerce company that purchases a lot overseas, this is a report that every single accountant or operator knows about. It's like it's really easy to get a snapshot of your current value of inventory. There's a lot of systems that can do that, but something that's really challenging is like no, the stuff that's been manufactured, I've put down deposit and it's shipped and it's on the water. What is the value of those goods? And we want to give our customers a really easy way to just get that valuation.

Billy Bush: 2:21

I mean oftentimes what you have incoming on all POs might be three times what's actually on the water, right, like so that's just and that's the big challenge is like I don't want the entire incoming number because that's every PO I've put out and every you know manufacturing process that's going on back there but it's not ours yet. When it becomes ours it hits the water, it's moving over here. I need to just get that number. So making that very easy to do and you'd be working.

Jared Ward: 2:42

Quite well what you were saying about the estimated landed cost. I think a lot of our existing customers will be excited for this, because when there's a massive delta let's say you purchase your products and they get aired in pretty consistently and maybe the unit cost without the air freight or maybe duties are very high it could be too tight, like the units could cost $2. But then when you add in all of the variable cost, duties, freight, the total cost of goods sold could be like $6. That's a problem. So this new valuation report that will be able to apply an estimated landed cost is incredibly useful because there won't be such a big delta between your unit cost without your variable cost and then your landed cost. So it's really nice to have an estimate until the variable costs are actualized, when you receive, when those shipments have been received and those variable costs have been applied.

Billy Bush: 3:33

Yeah, especially oftentimes those costs don't come in for multiple weeks after it actually shows up, right, you don't get all the invoices in and all the stuff in, and so that was the big issue. It's one to separate the inventory on what you need to value.

Jared Ward: 3:45

It's another thing to actually get an accurate landed value and not just what's what the you know the price was so you don't want to be looking at the P&L for May and it's like, oh, like, oh, margins looking really good and probabilities looking great, and it's like, nope, there's not and there's no estimate applied on that landed cost. So we're actually losing money. In the final one, in the realm of inventory valuations, we finally rolled out a updated, beefed up stock snapshot report. So stock snapshot used to just be what inventory did I have on hand and what was the value of that at a certain point in time, at a specific date in time, and you could essentially just go back in time and see what your stock levels were in the value. We beefed that up a little bit Specifically so we have this above the transaction COGS reports. So these are some of the reports that accountants will use. So now the stock snapshot will really help you out when you're closing the books.

Jared Ward: 4:42

Look as an accountant or as a CFO. When you close the books every month, you want your starting inventory value, let's say on the first of the month, the first of May, and this screen share right here, and then you go into the end of the month. So you want your starting inventory valuation and then you want everything that is going into that ending inventory balance. So in all, in one spot, we will summarize and show you everything's Everything that's been received and the value of that inventory, everything that's been sold and shipped out, depleted, and the value of that inventory, any adjustments that have been made and the value of those adjustments, and then and then that will get you to your ending inventory value and your numbers. So this was this is a massive update and we're excited to get even more feedback on this one to make it easier for accountants to close the books.

Billy Bush: 5:34

Yeah, it's now a true reconciliation of that inventory and not just a, you know, snapshot in time. So it's definitely gives you a lot more capability there for sure. All right. Next is an expansion on our cost allocations for arriving at your landed costs. This has been something that's been in the works for some time and a lot of people have been using elements of this. But really understanding the capabilities of how you can add costs to shipments into you know incoming things to be able to arrive at a true landed cost has really gone up a notch. So now with po shipments like when you create a shipment you can mix and match pos. Now this is a big deal. I mean any other systems out there like you can create pos. That's one thing. You might be able to add shipping costs and all these things, but it's all tied to this like one PO or maybe one shipment on one PO. It's always a one-to-one relationship.

Billy Bush: 6:21

The beauty here is, you know, we have clients that have 25 POs all going into one shipment or one PO. That's getting split into 75 ships, right, you've got just a ton of cargo going across. Each one of those can have its own freight costs that you can add whenever you're ready, and it's just the actual freight costs. You don't need to think about distributing it, just put it in and then the same with duties when you get your. You know the breakdown of the duties. You can put it in per category. This was the duty for that category, the totals, right. I'm not even worried about how it's distributed. It's just like. These are the duties for each category on that shipment and and it is all then allocated across all those SKUs into your costing automatically. So it doesn't matter which PO it came from, it doesn't matter. You know what the quantity is versus what you ordered or any of that kind of stuff. It's going to actually look at what is on that shipment and allocate it according to the category it's in, according whether it be value-based you know for like a duty which is common by the dollar or if it's weight-based or unit-based or volume-based for the actual freight. And you have all those different ways to be able to allocate those costs and spread it across all the POs and you know more of a real ordering.

Billy Bush: 7:26

Rarely have we ever seen and I don't honestly know anybody that truly follows a one PO to one shipment, one receipt. I mean you might only really simple brands? Yeah, a one PO to one shipment, one receipt. I mean, you might only really simple brands? Yeah, well, and even often when they do it, they actually do it in retrospect. So it's like, and it finally ships. They just create a PO to match the shipment, like, so it's not even what they actually ordered initially. It's just they need a PO that will match whatever was shipped so that they can do this. Well, now you can actually order it and do a proper you know account of those things across all those POs and not have to then go back and try to make your records match what occurred.

Jared Ward: 7:58

I'm really proud of the product team and the developers on this one. So good job, guys. Because this takes such a complex, nuanced issue where it's, I think I genuinely don't know anybody in our space who can do this. It's actually really cool. You can write a PO, split off a bunch of different shipments a thousand different ways. Those will get allocated all the correct ways to these specific line items of those shipments. It's really cool. This concept of cost layers has really gotten to the finish line it's really cool to see.

Jared Ward: 8:33

Next up on the list is returns. So in Luminous at e-commerce companies, returns is a big problem. There's so many different tools. There's RMA platforms like Loop or Redo or Corso. There's so many different ones. Very few of them actually do anything with a return object in the brand system of record. So it's kind of been a problem that as we've been very curious on how we're going to solve it. How can we make sure that both the finance side is going through into your general ledger and when you're closing the books, and also what do we do with that inventory object? So this is the first iteration of returns in Luminous.

Billy Bush: 9:16

Yeah, up to now we've kind of just relied on some of the channels to kind of tell us that that order was reversed or what might have happened, and now there was a lot of holes in that and so now we are supporting when the channel says this item has a return on it, so a Shopify return order is created or refunded and some of those things. We're causing kind of like a reverse transaction but actually creating a return order object in Luminous, so it will be properly tracked, both for inventory and also whether you know the refund is issued and for all the scenarios. I mean the primary scenarios are you know, if you've issued a refund but did not get a return, so that's taken care of. If you are getting a return and issued a refund, so you're actually getting it back, that's taken care of. Partial refunds are taken care of. Exchanges are working. We're working on exchanges right now and so that's something to finalize where there is no refund at all but we're just putting in exchange and so that is being finalized and wrapped up.

Billy Bush: 10:15

But it's relying on the channel Focus that right now and we'll continue to expand that we have definitely. I mean, when you're talking returns you can get into like not only do we need to restock it or not, but do you want to call it like, converted into like an A stock, b stock, c stock, do you want? What do you want to do with it? Right, and so that's going to be the next layer, you know is at present, you know you can to a degree, whether you decide to rest whatever it is, those are kind of some of the pieces on the the line, but at present we're going to be able to. Now we can actually show that return order properly, you know, and with the refund, and make sure it's accounted for, and just we'll start buttoning up the the holes there with exchanges and some pieces.

Jared Ward: 11:01

Uh, as we go here yeah, the key piece is both financially and then on the inventory object as well, the inventory value. Rather, like Billy said, this is just for Shopify only. We're only pulling it through Shopify, so if you aggregate your orders in Shopify, then this could be really useful for you. We're keen on getting more and more feedback. So if you wanna be in the round of feedback the rounds of feedback, feedback to make sure that your use case gets into the next round of updates for return orders then just reach out to billie or myself. All right, that's basically it. So not too many updates this this month.

Billy Bush: 11:36

I mean, it feels like there's hundreds of cards that have been pushed but we should clarify that there is a thousand others that were like minor bug fixes or adjustments for this or you know a hundred other things that we didn't actually mention here today. But those are at least some more significant feature adjustments. I guess we're trying to like.

Jared Ward: 11:52

We're trying to filter through the stuff and just make sure that we're surfacing the really valuable stuff that somebody like if I were a user, this is what we would want to know Tune in next month. We'll give you guys the new updates of the product next month and until then, stay classy san diego.

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