The Certificate Management System is a valuable tool designed to enhance traceability and documentation for products that are managed by lot numbers. At its core, the system enables vendor certificates—documents that verify quality, origin, compliance, or other vendor-provided assurances—to be attached directly to specific product lots.
Once attached, these certificates can be tagged so they are automatically available to be output with a packing list or invoice depending you your customers preferences. This ensures that necessary documentation accompanies product shipments and giving both sellers and buyers a clear, auditable record of the lot’s provenance and specifications.
The Business Edge has 4 flags to control how the certificate management system works. The four flags control whether the certificates are used on Purchase Orders, Receiving, Sales Orders and Allocations. Computer Insights can set these flags for you.
The documentation below assumes that all four of your flags are set to Yes.
Enter & Edit Certificate Type
Each certificate can be assigned to a defined category, allowing businesses to group certificates by type (for example, quality assurance, material composition, regulatory compliance, or handling instructions). This categorization simplifies retrieval, reporting, and compliance checks: users can filter or search by category to quickly locate the certificates relevant to a particular audit, regulatory submission, or customer request. Because the feature operates at the lot level, it reinforces inventory discipline by tying documentary evidence directly to the physical batches in which products are stored and moved.
First, start out by defining the different certificate types, using Enter & Edit Certificate Type:
Inventory System
Inventory File Maintenance
UOM, Category & Certificate System
Enter & Edit Certificate Type
Fill in the information in the form.
Include Cert on Order Forms is a Yes/No option for whether the certificate will print out on the quote, sales order, picking, packing and invoice forms. If you select no, the certificate becomes an internal certificate required for allocation, but the customer is unaware of the requirement.
Include Cert on PO/PPO/RFQ Form is a Yes/No option for whether the certificate will print out on the Purchase Order form. If you select No, in essence the certificate becomes an internal certificate that is required for receipt, but the vendor is unaware of the requirement.
The Cost on the Purchase Order is expensed to the GL account and revenue is posted to the Sales Revenue account. If the cert is marked as Not Active, the user will not be able to select it on new products / forms.
Enter & Edit Products
In Enter & Edit Products, you can assign certificates to be automatically assigned on the Purchase Order, RFQ/, and PPO by using the "Certificates" button.
You can choose which cert by using the "Include Certificate" or the "Do Not Include Certificate" or by right clicking on the individual line
You can drill into each cert if you want to set a default cost that is different than the standard cost for the certificate, and if you want to change the PPO Requirement. The PPO requirement is only used when the product is created on a PPO.
Enter & Edit Purchase Orders and RFQ's and Processing POs
When editing a detail line in Enter & Edit Purchase Orders, the default certificates from Enter & Edit Products are automatically assigned to the purchase order. You can edit which certs and their specific cost by using the "Certificates" button.
You can also edit the Product's Default Certificates by using the "Default Certificates" button. Once you exit that screen, you will be asked if you want to Change the Purchase Order to use the Default Certificates.
You can see which lines have certificates associated with them and the added cost to the Purchase Order in the Detail Lines:
Processing POs have an option to change whether they are used to qualify the raw material or requested on the PPO for the vendor to provide
Receiving Purchase Orders and Processing Purchase Orders
When receiving a PPO, the certs that are from the raw materials are automatically brought into the lot, so they do not have to be rescanned.
When receiving a product that requires certificates from the vendor, a screen will display where you can choose to scan/upload the certificates. Since one certificate from the vendor may be classified as fulfilling multiple certificate categories, you can choose multiple categories for one scan.
Once you have selected which certificate types will be scanned in, you will be prompted to scan/upload the image into documentConnection:
When a certificate has a document scanned in for it, the certificate code gets a green check next to it. You can choose another certificate type to scan.
If you receive a certificate that fits a different certificate type than the one you requested on the Purchase Order, you can use the "Show All Certificates" to show all the certificate types in your system and then choose another one to scan in.
Show Missing Certificates
In Product Inquiry - Lot Tracking Detail, lots with all required certificates are shown with a blue "Information icon. Those missing certificates show with a yellow! icon. If you mouse over the icon, it will show which certificates are available and which are missing:
There is also a report - Product Lots Missing Certificates - that will show you missing certificates:
Purchase Order System
Purchase Order Reports
PO Receipts Journals
Lots Missing Certificates & Inspections
Enter & Edit Customers
You can assign default certificates to be included on all sales orders in Enter & Edit Customers, using the Default Certificates button. You can right click on each cert to toggle it to be included or not included on a sales order. You can also drill into each line to change the Default Price for this customer for a specific certificate. There is also an option to require only if the Product requires cert from vendor.
You can also assign default certificates for a specific product code on all sales orders in Enter & Edit Customers, using the Default Product Certificates button.
You can right click on each cert to toggle it to be included or not included on a sales order. You can also drill into each line to change the Default Price for this customer for a specific certificate.
Enter & Edit Orders
In Enter & Edit Orders, when you add a product to a sales order, the customer's default certs are automatically added for the line item. You can use the Certificates button to change them for the individual line item:
When using the Reserve Lot button or when allocating the Sales Order, each lot will have an information icon. Blue "I" buttons mean the lot can be allocated to the sales order and yellow exclamation boxes means that the lot cannot be allocated to the sales order. If you mouse over the icon, you can see which certificates are missing
Printing Certificates
In Enter & Edit Certificate Printing Options, you can choose which forms the certificates will be attached to.
Utilities
Document Flags
Enter & Edit Certificate Printing Options
Show Document Detail Information on Cert - when set to Yes, the system will use a form letter head and include information like the lot number, customer, order #, Purchase Order #, etc. and shrink the scanned/uploaded image into an area on the form. If it is set to No, the scanned/uploaded image will be added to the form without any of this information.
In summary, the Certificate Management System brings systematic documentation and improved traceability to lot-tracked products by linking vendor certificates to product lots, categorizing those certificates for efficient management, and providing configurable controls for where certificates are enforced across procurement and distribution workflows. When properly configured, this capability strengthens quality assurance, simplifies compliance, and streamlines the flow of documentation through the supply chain