For your inbound shipment, or ASN (Advanced Shipment Notification), to be considered a compliant receipt, it must follow our Routing Guide and be clearly labeled with the ASN ID on the carton, BOL, packing slips, and labels.
The ASN ID is the customer identifier for your inbound shipment what our team primarily uses to lookup your physical inbound shipment and match it to the ASN in our system for receiving. You should enter the ASN ID as the customer_identifier on the ASN Upload template.
We provide support for an additional reference field, Customer Purchase Order ID, on the header of the ASN that can also be used to help our team identify and match the inbound shipment to the ASN in our system and for your reference as well. You should enter the Customer Purchase Order ID as the customer_purchase_order_id on the ASN template.
ASN ID is required on the physical inventory, but if the label or pack list is damaged or illegible for some reason, the Customer Purchase Order ID can help us as a secondary way to identify the shipment.
Scenarios when you consolidate POs on more than one shipment
However, there are scenarios where you may have multiple purchase orders included on the same vendor shipment or working with a consolidator who is grouping your inventory together from different vendors and shipping it all on one ASN to MasonHub. In this scenario when you have multiple different Box IDs, you should use the box_ids field on the ASN Upload, which is mapped to the line item for each SKU on the ASN.
- When you have a 1:1 Purchase Order to ASN relationship on an inbound shipment, use the Purchase Order Name field on the ASN. If you don’t have a PO Number for the shipment, then it’s OK to use the ASN ID for both.
This ASN’s pallets and boxes will all be labeled with the same ASN Number and Purchase Order ID. There is no need to use the Box IDs column.
- When you have a many:1 POs to ASN relationship to an inbound shipment, use the Box IDs field on the ASN.
The color groupings show that each box will be labeled with the ASN’s customer_identifier as well as the Purchase Order ID you have indicated in the box_ids column. For example, PO100 might come in many boxes but each of those will be grouped together on the pallet and include a label with ASN ID SH-1812-18845 and PO Number PO 100.
- If a SKU is on more than one PO in the shipment, then only include 1 line item for the sum of the SKU and list the POs as a comma-separated list in the CSV file.
SKU-ID-1 was purchased on two separate POs and will be boxed in different boxes with different labels, indicating each ASN and PO number. For example, one box will be labeled with ASN SH-1812-18845 and PO Number PO100. The other box will be labeled with ASN SH-1812-18845 and PO Number PO125.
How our team uses these reference IDs to search for your ASN
Our Receiving Team will first search our OMS for your ASN ID to find the ASN to receive when your inventory arrives. If they cannot find it in the system, they will look for a secondary ID on the pallet labels, carton labels, and pack slip. They will search for this secondary ID in the Purchase Order field or the Box ID field to try and find your ASN.
If your ASN cannot be located in our system using any of these methods, then it will be flagged on the receiving dock and someone will reach out to your team to let you know you need to create an ASN or help us identify which one it matches to. Then the ASN will be flagged as non-compliant and incur the appropriate fees.
Example file to get you started
Click here to download a file with the examples above that will help guide you when creating ASNs to upload in the MasonHub OMS.