Same serial no for different items

ERPNext Manufacturing
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1

Hi,

I am having an issue with assigning the same serial no for different items. I thought I saw a thread stating that this was fixed a while ago.

Here is an example; assign serial no 001 to item A and the same serial no to item B. Is there a way to do this? I would think this is possible since the serial no should only be unique to the item not all serial nos.

I am playing around with V13-beta.6 so I am not sure if this is a bug or not. Thanks in advanced!

2

Hey,

Right now, no two items can have the same serial number. Even if you have the same series for serial no. for two items, and create a single Purchase receipt for both of them, the serial no. created with be as follows:

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This design is intentional because serial numbers are unique.

3

We have always used a simple serial no from 001 to 999 range for each product (or item in this case). It will be difficult to switch to every product to have a unique serial no at this point.

Do you think using the following naming convention is a possible workaround?

  • Item A = A-001
  • Item B = B-001

Of course the actual item names would be more complex. The issue I have with the above example is that we will be slowly implementing this ERP system and will be using stock entries to add the Items for now. This would require manually entering the serial no and will be difficult for the more complex serial nos unless there is an easier way?

I think the auto generation for serial nos is only available for Work Orders, correct?

4

Ok I played with it more and found when I try to add stock using the dashboard menu inside the item I get the following error when I do not enter any serial nos…

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But when I start a new stock entry then add the item it auto generates the serial nos if I do not enter anything…

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So I think I have a workaround, not ideal but it could work. I am just including the Part Number (Item Name in this case) with an auto generated no at the end for the serial no. Please let me know if this is not a good approach or if there is a better way. Thanks!

5

Yes, this would be perfect.

What kind of a stock entry were you trying to do? Was it Material Transfer?

6

I found that if I just close the popup error and “Select Serial Nos” window it would allow me to enter stock using the auto-generated way. Thanks for the help!

7

Serial numbers are unique. But there’s nothing that stops one manufacturers item from being the same as another’s, no matter how unlikely the chance. This would render the barcodes on the items useless.

Would be good if this could be amended, or perhaps that when a barcode scanned in or a serial number is entered on a purchase receipt the Serial Number Series is added as a prefix after user submit.

Sorry to dig up an old topic but this is the first result on google when searching for the problem and it’s not really a fix.

8

I think there needs to be a different way of handling generated serial numbers versus manually created serial numbers.

Manually entered serial numbers should cause a pop-up warning of duplication. The user can then choose to add a suggested prefix or suffix (for instance the item number, or another unique identifier like manufacturer).

Generated serial numbers should silently skip over duplicates and simply create the next available number in the series.

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