Multi Order Shipments — User Guide

Multi Order Shipments lets one physical delivery produce one delivery note. Business Central normally posts a separate shipment document for every sales order; with this app the lines of several orders end up on the same posted shipment.

Use it to:

• send one delivery note with the goods, however many orders are on the pallet;
• stop your warehouse matching three documents to one box;
• append an order to a shipment you have already posted today;
• ship several transfer orders between the same two locations on one document.

The field and button names below are those shown when the English language is active.

1. Set it up once

Page: Warehouse Setup → General section

Action: turn on Combine Shipments.

What happens: every warehouse shipment created from now on starts with combining switched on. The setting is only the default — each warehouse shipment carries its own Combine Shipment toggle that you can turn off for that document alone (see section 2).

Existing warehouse shipments are not touched: they keep the value they were created with.

If you never post through warehouse shipments, you can leave this off and work order by order instead (see section 3).

2. Combine orders from a warehouse shipment

This is the automatic route: you pick and pack as usual, and the shipment document decides on its own that everything on it belongs together.

Page: Warehouse Shipment

Action: build the shipment as you always do — Get Source Documents… to pull in the lines of as many sales orders as the delivery covers — check that Combine Shipment is on, then post it.

In the picture, shipment SH000021 carries lines from orders 101038, 101039 and 101040, and Combine Shipment is on.

What happens: all the orders on the document are posted onto a single posted sales shipment instead of one each. Everything else — quantities, item ledger entries, the orders themselves — behaves exactly as it always has.

2.1 When the orders are not combined

The app steps back and lets Business Central post normally when:

• Combine Shipment is off on that warehouse shipment;
• the document does not consist only of sales order lines — if it also holds transfer lines or lines from other sources, nothing is combined.

2.2 The orders must belong together

Before posting, the app checks that all the orders on the document agree on four things:

• Sell-to Customer No.
• Bill-to Customer No.
• Ship-to Code
• Shipping No. Series

If one of them differs, posting stops with the usual "must be equal to…" message naming the field, and nothing is posted. Take the odd order off the warehouse shipment and post it on its own.

3. Append one order to an existing shipment

This is the manual route, order by order — useful when the goods leave with a delivery you have already posted.

Page: Sales Order → Shipping and Billing section

Action: in Append-To Shpt. No., pick the posted shipment the order should join, then post the order.

What happens: the order's lines are added to that posted shipment instead of creating a new one, and Append-To Shpt. No. is emptied automatically once the order is posted — so the field never fires twice.

The lookup only offers shipments the order can actually join: same customer, same bill-to customer, same ship-to address, same shipping number series, and the same posting date as the order. If the list is empty, one of those five is different — most often the date.

4. What the posted shipment looks like

Page: Posted Sales Shipment

One document now holds the lines of every order that was combined into it.

Two things are worth knowing when you read it:

• The Order No. in the header is empty. It is filled in only while the shipment belongs to a single order; as soon as a second order joins, it is cleared because there is no longer one right answer.
• Each line keeps its own Order No., so you can always see which order a line came from. That is the column to read — and the one to use when you print or export the document.

Invoicing is untouched: invoice each order the usual way, or pull the lines of the combined shipment into one invoice with Get Shipment Lines.

5. Transfer orders

Transfers work the same way, and with no setting to turn on.

Page: Warehouse Shipment made only of transfer order lines

Action: post it as usual.

What happens: all the transfer orders on the document are posted onto a single posted transfer shipment. Here the app checks that the orders share:

• Transfer-from Code
• Transfer-to Code
• Posting Date

As with sales orders, posting stops if one of them differs. Note that for transfers the combining does not depend on Combine Shipments in Warehouse Setup, and there is no field on the transfer order for choosing a shipment by hand: a warehouse shipment made only of outbound transfer lines is always combined.

Good to know

• The toggle is a default, not a switch you must keep. Warehouse Setup decides what new warehouse shipments start with; the document's own Combine Shipment field is what actually counts at posting.
• Only whole documents are combined. A warehouse shipment mixing sales order lines with anything else is posted the standard way, with no error and no message.
• The posting date is part of the match. In Warehouse Setup it comes for free — everything on a warehouse shipment posts on the same date. In Append-To Shpt. No. it is the usual reason a shipment you expected is missing from the lookup.
• Posting several orders at once takes a little longer than posting them separately: the whole group succeeds or fails together, so nothing is written until every check has passed.
• Nothing is combined retroactively. Shipments already posted stay as they are; the app only affects what you post from now on.
• Order No. on the header of a combined shipment stays empty for good. If a report or an integration of yours reads that field, point it at the line-level Order No. instead.