Selling a product is the easy part to track. The hard part starts three months later, when a customer calls about a unit you shipped, and you have to work out what you actually sent them.
If you sell products and support them afterward, one customer’s story usually lives in several places. The invoice is in your billing tool. The delivery is in a spreadsheet or on a carrier’s website. The serial number is in a notebook or on the supplier’s packing list. The support conversation is in somebody’s inbox. Each piece works fine on its own. Answering “what did we send them, and what have we done about it?” means opening all of them.
Where the time goes
It rarely shows up as one big failure. It shows up as small jobs that repeat:
- Finding out which exact unit a customer has, when the serial number was written down somewhere you can’t remember.
- Handling a return. The goods come back, so stock has to go up. The customer’s bill has to come down. Those are two separate steps, and one of them tends to get forgotten.
- Answering a support request without knowing what was delivered, from which warehouse, or whether it ever arrived.
What it looks like in Epic 360
With the Inventory module on, you can turn on serial numbers for any item. Serials are registered when you receive or count stock, and you can look up any number to see which item it is and which warehouse holds it. A report lists every unused serial still in stock.
When it’s time to deliver, the billed lines waiting to ship become a delivery order. You choose where it ships from and where it goes, confirm it, pick a delivery method (a carrier or one of your own vehicles), mark it shipped, and complete it once the customer has the goods. If a warehouse is set to check stock, you can’t ship what isn’t there, and serial-controlled items need their numbers before they can be marked shipped.
If something comes back, the shipped delivery has a “Returned to warehouse” action. It puts the goods back in stock, and when the order has serial numbers, you confirm that those same numbers came back. The billing side is a separate step: you issue a credit to the customer, which reduces what they owe and leaves the original invoice in place. Sometimes you only need one of the two. A refused delivery gets restocked and sent again with no credit. A pricing error gets a credit and no stock moves.
For support, you open a case from the customer record with a contact, subject, description, owner, category, and priority. You can attach a contract or an item if it applies. From there, status changes, phone calls, appointments, notes, and photos all go on the case’s timeline, and you can create a work order when a technician needs to go out.
Same customer, same record, from the sale to the follow-up.
What Epic 360 is not
Epic 360 is not an enterprise ERP, and it isn’t trying to replace a dedicated warehouse system for a large operation. It’s built for the small business that sells products, delivers them, and supports them afterward, and wants that history under one customer. Inventory is an optional module, and serial tracking only applies to the items you turn it on for. If something you need isn’t there, tell us. That feedback shapes what gets built next.
Try it with your real products
Epic 360 is free to start, with no credit card, up to 25 active customers. That’s enough to add a few of your products, ship one to a customer, and open a case on it, to see whether the history stays together the way you’d want.
If you’ve ever answered a customer’s call about a unit by checking three different places, this is for you.
Epic 360 is business management software for service, rental, and recurring-ops businesses: quotes, contracts, automatic billing, and service history in one place.