Wednesday, June 7, 2023

(The following is now maintained in Storage management)

I am still meditating for #4551 (A first example of warehouse management). Continued from Saturday, May 27, 2023.

A provision (Vorrat) is when a given quantity of a given product is in a given storage state for a given partner.

A storage state is a name given to a certain type of provision. Some typical storage states:

01

auf Lager

in stock

02

bestellt vom Kunden

ordered by customer

03

bestellt bei Lieferant

ordered from provider

04

ausgeliehen

rented out

05

beschädigt

damaged

06

in Reparatur

under repair

07

gekauft

purchased

In Lino Noi we would use only one storage state “purchased”, and two transfer rules:

  • A sales invoice (SLS) credits “purchased”

  • A service report (SRV) debits “purchased”

And there would be only one product with storage management enabled, and that product would be named “Time credit”. Maybe there will be multiple products in order to differentiate between “temporary” (befristet) and “timeless” (unbefristet) time credit.

A subscription agreement must somehow specify the “required provision”, which means that the customer must always have a minimum provision of time credit. For example they buy 10 hours, which are being used up with each working session, and when the time credit gets used up they want to buy new credit. This can be done by Subscription.get_wanted_invoice_items. For each subscription that has such a “required provision”, it would check whether the partner still has enough provision. If not, it would generate an invoice to buy new time credit.

To specify this, we could simply add three new fields:

  • “product” : a pointer to the “Time credit” product

  • a minimum quantity (e.g. 5 hours)

  • an order quantity (e.g. 10 hours)

This reminds what the Tariff model and the InvoicingInfo class do until now. And indeed the storage plugin will partly replace these classes.

We have two basic approaches for generating invoices:

  • get_invoicing_periodicity() or “period-based invoicing” : The enrolment has a start_date and an end_date, and the “subscription periodicity” gives renew_unit, renew_every and renew_before. Period-based invoicing is for subscriptions, with a monthly or yearly fee.

  • get_invoicing_pass_type() or “occurence-based invoicing” : Lino needs a number_of_events, a min_asset and max_asset. This is used e.g. in Voga when a customer buys a “multi-pass card” for 10 sessions of an activity.

I am not yet sure where to store these information. Maybe we just want to add a Tariff.product field. The current flatrates (Tariff) do not currently point to another product.

qty

minimum

12

4

5

1

8

2

Side note. How to handle quantity-related prices? For example the unit price of an hour would be 90 € while 5 hours would cost only 400 € and 10 hours only 750 €. –> This is not related to the storage plugin and should be addressed by “price rules” or “complex products”.