Shipment Method is a code on customers, vendors and sales documents stating the delivery terms, for example EXW or DAP. It carries no posting logic of its own.
A shipment method is a small code table describing the terms on which goods are handed over, most often the Incoterm agreed with the customer. It is descriptive: it prints on documents and can be filtered and grouped, but it posts nothing and changes no cost. It is a different concept from the shipping agent, which is the carrier, and from the shipping agent service, which is the service level.
Search for Shipment Methods with Alt+Q to open the list, which holds a code and a description. You assign the code on the Customer card, on the Shipping FastTab, in the Shipment Method Code field, and it then defaults onto sales documents where it can still be changed per document. The same table is used on the purchase side through the Vendor card and purchase documents.
You create the code DAP with the description Delivered at Place, transport paid by seller, and set it on Alpine Retail AG. Sales order 1042 created on 3 March 2026 picks up DAP automatically, so the order confirmation and the shipment both show it and the warehouse knows freight is not charged to the customer. The freight cost itself still has to be entered as a purchase line or as an item charge if you want it inside the item cost.
The term is regularly confused with the shipping agent service and people expect the delivery date to move; only a shipping agent service with a shipping time affects the planned delivery date. A second misunderstanding is expecting freight to be charged automatically: the code says who bears the cost, it does not create a line. Free text discipline also matters, because codes such as EXW and EX-WORKS created by different users cannot be grouped in a report. Finally, changing the code on a customer does not update sales documents that already exist.
Keep the list short and aligned to the Incoterms version you actually contract on, and put that version in the description so nobody has to guess. If you ship across borders, decide once and write down whether the shipment method code is the field your team reads for delivery terms, so that document templates and any statistical reporting all draw from the same place.
Shipment Method states the commercial delivery terms, meaning who bears transport cost and risk. Shipping Agent is the carrier itself, with its own services, and only a shipping agent service with a shipping time affects the planned delivery date.
From the Shipment Method Code on the Customer card, copied onto the order header when the document is created. Changing the customer afterwards does not update orders that already exist.
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