Tip
The following features are specific to industries such as electronics, retail, or food. You will also find features related to specific business models, such as offers and centralized communication in B2B trade.
A written offer document is the most legally secure form of an offer, in which goods, conditions, and delivery can be specified. Offers can be created online, in writing, or verbally. They are binding when certain conditions are met
A written offer can include, among other things, a description of the goods/ service, price, delivery time, and payment terms. In B2B transactions, written offers for high-value goods with specific delivery requirements are standard, while in B2C transactions, the main focus is on attractive presentation of the online offer and easy payment for the customer.
With follow-ups, you can schedule tasks and set automatic reminders after certain deadlines. This feature can be particularly helpful in the area of acquiring new customers and sales, and is also applicable to many different fields.
An offer can be automatically scheduled for follow-up upon approval. The follow-up reminder prompts you and your team to follow up, for example, after 14 days.
Reminders can be assigned to a customer, a responsible employee, or even a project. You receive all reminders, color-coded for easy reference, in a list along with key details for a comprehensive overview.
You can initiate or view various CRM activities related to a contact in Xentral. This provides you with an overall view of your major customers and the correspondence conducted by different employees in your team. For instance, emails, sending of offers, notes, reminders, appointments, or dispatched documents are listed in the CRM section of the contact for your reference.
With a collective invoice, you can consolidate delivered goods into a single invoice. The invoice pertains to partial sales orders from your customer based on previously created delivery notes. Sales orders that have already been invoiced are not included in the collective invoice. With this feature, you can bundle multiple open delivery notes and invoice them at a predetermined time, such as at the end of the month. The collective invoice helps you keep track of your billing, especially for large customers with numerous sales orders or specific payment and delivery terms.
With the standard purchase order proposal or the Extended purchase order proposal module, you can automatically convert purchase order proposals into purchase orders when inventory levels are low.
The Fast goods receipt feature enables efficient handling of goods received, particularly for large quantities of products or low-value products without special inspection requirements that need to be quickly stored. The feature offers various functionalities such as package acceptance, label printing, and product storage in a single step, overview of open positions from a supplier, automatic assignment to a default warehouse with the option for individual storage. Moreover it offers the ability to store multiple products with just one click and print labels for individual or all products simultaneously (batch printing).
If you want to carefully inspect high-value items during goods receipt, you can use the goods receipt parcel acceptance module. The goods receipt process is divided into individual steps for package acceptance and distribution. Quantities, contents, and shipping documents can be confirmed.
You can use production for individual customer sales orders or for the internal reproduction of your range of products.
Note
Productions can be created for customers or for your own company. To do this, create your contact in the customer master data and assign a customer number to your contact.
If your company is also registered as a supplier in Xentral in the contacts master data, you can see in the purchasing list which products in the warehouse need to be reproduced. For material procurement, you should set a purchase price for all production products from a standard supplier.
The functions in the production module are related to bill of materials (BOM) products. The product to be produced is considered as the head of the bill of materials, while the required sub-products are included in the production process.
Note
If you insert individual products instead of bills of materials into production, you won't receive material suggestions and picking lists.
With the Convert purchase order to production feature, you can directly convert purchase orders into production orders, provided that the bill of materials is marked as a production product. This module does not have its own interface; instead, you can find this function in the action menu of the respective purchase order and proceed to convert the purchase order into a production order.
Serial numbers can be recorded in various processes, including during the receipt of delivered products, during the numbering of internally produced products, during the assembly of parts with serial numbers into your products (sub-bills of materials), and during the sale or shipment of products to associate serial numbers with customers (e.g., barcode scanning at the packing station). Serial numbers can also be recorded via the stocktaking process (using the Mobile Inventory App).
For your products, you can activate the batch and BBD management. To do this, go to a product and enable the option for batch management and best before date.
These settings result in the corresponding values being queried in goods receipt and goods issue. Additionally, in the product details under Best before date + Batch, you can view the current batches and add new entries.
In Xentral, inventory changes during stock in and stock out processes follow the following principle: During stock out processes, the location with the lowest stock level is utilized or suggested. During stock in processes, the location with the highest stock level is preferred.
Batch and BBD can also be recorded using the stocktaking app (= Mobile Inventory App) in Xentral.
The Dropshipping Warehouse feature assists you whenever you need to ship goods from multiple warehouse locations. It doesn't matter whether the locations are within your company or if you're outsourcing logistics to a third-party provider.
The features include setting rules and priorities for sales order allocation, converting partial sales orders into partial deliveries, and preparing partial or collective invoices. Additionally, fields such as project and/or Preferred Warehouse in the sales order can be populated according to predefined rules. The dropshipping warehouse function can be triggered in various ways, such as manual sales order processing, automatic process starters, auto-shipping (handover to logistics), and shop imports (collecting sales orders via an interface).
The Dropshipping Supplier function helps you when you don't have products in stock and ship through various suppliers or source upon request. You can create partial sales orders and/or automatically generate purchase orders for suppliers.
With this module, you can also create dropshipping groups to allocate based on specific criteria, such as product range. The Dropshipping Supplier function can be triggered in various ways, as mentioned above.
The Fulfillment (3PL) (= transfer module) facilitates the exchange of transactional data by sending outbound data from Xentral to the target system or making it available for retrieval and by fetching, reading, and further processing inbound data.
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Outgoing: Outgoing data, for example, is stored in the FTP directory and made available there for pickup.
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Incoming: Incoming data is copied from external sources into the folder and regularly read and interpreted by Xentral, for example, converted into sales orders.
The module offers various options for connecting to shipping or fulfillment service providers, including the transmission of inventory data, product transfer, and provision of documents such as sales orders, delivery notes, or invoices as PDF files.
Note
You can find the formats for data transmission in this article: Transfers (CSV/XML/EDI/PDF)
Information on shipping goods to the EU can be found in the article Delivery threshold.