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Setting up projects

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Goal

Projects are an important base component in Xentral. They allow you to streamline and group certain processes, organize your logistics, and create filters. By defining and creating a well-organized project, you can streamline your operations. This guide will show you how to use projects in general.

Prerequisites

There are no requirements before setting up your project structure.

Workflow

  1. When do we use projects in Xentral?

  2. What settings are controlled by the projects?

  3. How should I structure my projects?

  4. Creating a new project

When do we use projects in Xentral?

In general, each project represents one particular part of your business. Projects have different options in Xentral. The following options are the most important:

  • Projects allow you to use settings other than what you defined in your basic settings for a specific type of orders. For example, if you want to have another layout for your invoices within a specific part of your business.
  • You can create projects to distinguish between different logistic workflows. Xentral associates orders with a specific project, determining how they are processed within your warehouse.
  • Projects are one of the most powerful filters. Since every main object like products, orders, or addresses is associated with a project, you can filter in almost all modules for the specific part of your business represented by the project.

What settings are controlled by the projects?

Projects are another layer of settings between your Basic settings and Contact settings. You may find some settings repeated within the projects that you can also find under basic or contact settings. These settings override each other always by the same logic:

  • Project settings override Basic settings.
  • Contact settings override Project settings.
  • Order settings override Contact settings.

This structure allows you to set different settings for different parts of your business. For example, you can upload your document background in Basic settings and Project settings. As soon as you select the project for an order, Xentral creates a document using the PDF background from the project, not the one from your Basic settings. Other projects might use a different template from your Basic settings.

This structure affects different parts of Xentral, like the email account used to send the tracking or invoice mail, your number ranges, or certain accounting settings.

How should I structure my projects?

We advise using projects in the following cases: 

  • Per sales channel - We strongly recommend defining one project for each of your sales channels. If you sell on Shopify, Amazon, and by manual order creation, you should have a dedicated project for each of these channels.
  • Per logistic process - If you have different logistics processes, you should create a project for each of them. This allows you to address the settings of each process individually without interfering with another.
  • For fulfillment (third-party logistics) -  If you have to send a part of your orders to a partner or fulfiller, you should create a project for each fulfiller.

Example

You sell on Shopify, Amazon (Fulfillment By Amazon and Fulfillment by merchant), and by manual order creation. This should be your project structure:

  • Project #1 - Organize your manual order creation (mostly the B2B business).
  • Project #2 - Organize Shopify. Xentral adds each new order created by Shopify in the Shopify project. The Shopify Project contains the needed logistics settings.
  • Project Amazon FBA #3 - Amazon FBA is a different logistics process than Shopify, so you need another project to cover it.
  • Project #4 Amazon FBM - Amazon FBM is still Amazon, but it needs completely different handling than FBA orders. Therefore, you will need a dedicated project for it.
  • Project #5 Testing (optional) -  It makes sense to create a testing project, which you can use to test your processes during onboarding. You can use the test project to distinguish between real and test orders. You can filter out Invoices on your test project when using the Xentral financial export.

Creating a new project

You can find the preconfigured Standard project in Master data > Project. You can rename this project and even use it as your testing project.

  1. Log into Xentral and go to Master data > Project.
  2. Click +New.
  3. Select Create a new project.

    Note: The system asks you whether you want to create a new project or a copy of an existing one. If you already did your logistics settings in one project and you want to implement the same process for another project, select the copy existing project button.

  4. Enter the name in the Designation field.
  5. Enter a short identifier in the Indentifier field. We recommend a short abbreviation such as amz for Amazon.
  6. Click Next to generate the new project.

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