How to Manage Inbound Shipments in Luminous

What is an inbound shipment?

I'm going to show you what inbound shipments look like inside of Luminous. Let's take a look.

First and foremost, what does inbound shipment mean? An inbound shipment is just a group or cluster of goods, products or materials going into something. That something is typically a 3PL, your warehouse or FBA; it's something that needs an object to receive it against. That's what an inbound shipment is.

The problem: two shipments that never meet

Here's the problem. In modern commerce, if I use FBA or a 3PL, a lot of times they have a separate shipment, and we, the brand, in Luminous have our own concept of a shipment, and the two never meet.

So what Luminous does to bridge the gap and give you more power over your shipments is help you reconcile these two shipments between the two systems. We're one of the few systems that actually does this. It gives you, the brand, the ability to prioritize your own information.

Where inbound shipments come from

Inbound shipments are usually from a PO, a TO or just a shipment. A PO is a purchase order, a TO is a transfer order, and a shipment could be something split off from a PO or a TO.

Split a shipment off a PO

I'm on the Purchase Orders page in Luminous. Let's go over a common use case. Say I just wrote a PO to my supplier in China that's going to be imported directly into FBA. I've already added it to my Seller Central account, I've already drafted the purchase order to that supplier, and now it's time to route the shipment, or at least split off the goods I'm going to route directly to FBA.

Here's what it looks like in Luminous. Here's the PO; let me route off the shipment. I'm creating a new shipment from this PO. I can use any reference number I want; maybe this is shipment one of three for PO number one. You can name it whatever you want. We have custom statuses if you want them, and you don't have to use them if you don't want to.

One cool part about our shipments is that Luminous does inventory costing in layers. When you split off shipments, my shipment to FBA is probably going to have freight and duties, and I want those allocated in a very specific way. That's another video, but just an FYI that it exists. So I'll split this off and save it. Boom.

The Inbound Shipments tab

Now for getting the shipment from the other system to match and reconciling it. That's what the Inbound Shipments tab in Luminous is for. As the user, you'll get notified. You might not like getting notified if you do tons of FBA shipments, so you can turn off notifications and not receive an email for this.

Let's say an FBA shipment has come in and it's pending, meaning it hasn't been reconciled yet. The inbound shipments on the Pending tab are shipments from your 3PL, from FBA or from another external source that haven't been reconciled.

Reconcile a pending shipment

I'm going into one of these shipments, FBA18TR. I'll click on it and click Reconcile. What this shows me is the shipment status from the external source. In this case it's FBA, but it could be a 3PL. They have their own concept of a shipment. These are the total quantities on the shipment, and these are the quantities received so far.

The reconciliation process is pretty simple. I can draft a new TO from this, which opens a modal to draft a new transfer order, or a PO. I can map it to an existing PO, or to an existing PO shipment. Or I can just dismiss it.

Let's say I route this to PO number one. My PO and this shipment are now linked, which means the quantities being received by the external source are now reconciled against my purchase order, shipment or transfer order.

Actual cost is recognized at receipt

What's also happening here is that we're recognizing an actual cost. By the way, the unit cost is zero because this is a staging environment and I didn't add any cost. If I had, it would show right here, and that would be the amount recognized at this receipt and posted to cost of goods sold.

Why reconciliation matters

The reason this is so important: if you've done business with a 3PL or with Amazon, what you purchase or send to them doesn't always make it there, and a lot of times there's human error. So instead of reconciling through two separate Google Sheets, Luminous links those two shipments together, so you can reconcile them and see what's been received versus what you actually sent.

The Reconciled page

If I go back out, here's the Reconciled page. The POs I've finished reconciling, where everything's been received, are right here. I can click in and view the details, the cost that's been received, and exactly the quantity I sent versus what was actually received. If it's off, there will be warnings.

Bulk reconciliation

There are also a lot of ways to declutter this. For example, if you use AWD, transfers from AWD to FBA are really annoying and clutter up the system. We have bulk reconciliation flows where you can just auto-reconcile those.

Wrapping up

There are some other cool features, and how you use this page really depends on your supply chain flow. But for brands that use 3PLs with a WMS we link into, or that use FBA, this is generally the workflow: inbound shipments in your system, the brand system, Luminous, are matched with shipments from external sources like FBA or your 3PL's WMS, and you can see how far off you are between what you sent and what they actually received. That's it, guys. Thanks.