Why connect Unleashed

Unleashed is where many product businesses keep the truth about stock: what is on hand, what is on order, what has been sold and what it cost. The trouble starts when orders arrive somewhere else, in a web shop, a retailer's EDI feed or a B2B portal, and someone has to re-key them into Unleashed every morning. By the end of this lesson you will know what connecting Unleashed to Supply Lens changes, and what this course will take you through.

The problem the integration solves

A typical Unleashed business has three or four systems that each hold part of the picture:

• A storefront such as Shopify or WooCommerce, where customers place orders.
• Unleashed, which manages stock, warehouses, purchasing and sales orders.
• A warehouse or 3PL that picks and ships.
• An accounting system such as Xero, which Unleashed posts to.

Without an integration, people bridge the gaps by hand. Orders are re-typed, stock levels drift between the shop and Unleashed, and tracking numbers are copied back one at a time. Every manual step is a chance for a typo, a missed order or an oversold product.

What Supply Lens does in the middle

Supply Lens sits between Unleashed and your other systems. It receives a Document (an order, a shipment, a stock update) from one Integration, translates it into the shape the next system expects, and sends it on. Mappings decide which Documents go where.

The dotted line matters. Unleashed has its own connection to Xero, which creates invoices and stock journals. Supply Lens settings can influence what Unleashed passes to Xero, and the advanced module explains how, but the journals themselves are Unleashed's.

What a good integration gives you

• No re-keying. Orders from every channel arrive in Unleashed as sales orders, with the right customer, warehouse, delivery method and tax.
• One stock position. Unleashed stock levels flow back out to your sales channels.
• Fulfilment that closes the loop. When an order ships, the dispatch and tracking go back to the channel the order came from.
• Rules instead of habits. The decisions people make by hand today ("wholesale orders go in Parked", "this store's orders belong to Sam") become configuration settings that apply every time.

What this course covers

1. Why connect, what can flow, and what to gather first.
2. Creating and configuring the Integration.
3. How orders move into and out of Unleashed.
4. A settings deep-dive, grouped by decision: statuses, references, customers, delivery, pricing and tax, dates and shipments.
5. Advanced topics: delivery contacts, rounding, purchase orders, and COGS and stock on hand in Xero.
6. Testing, go-live and troubleshooting.

This course assumes you have taken Connecting your systems, which explains Integrations, Documents and Mappings in general.