We provide a tolling service (processing) for many of our customers and invoice them upon completion of the production run. In many cases, we do not ship the finished goods to the customers until a point later in time. However, once we post an invoice, the system assumes the product is shipped which prevents us from creating and posting a bill of lading at a later time (since the goods are no longer available). There should be a way to post an invoice without shipping the product so that at a later point, we can create and post a bill of lading when we ultimately ship to our customer. In other words, we should be able to invoice (but not ship), and ship (but not invoice). This seems like a standard functionality of any ERP used in manufacturing but we have been told the system does not have this functionality.
We have come up with some work arounds which effectively trick the system, but each just adds complexity and increases risk of manual errors. Is there a technical solution built into the system that allows for invoicing but not shipping so that we can ship at a later point in time and have the goods available to create and post the bill of lading?