Sales

Sales keeps your customers and the documents you sell to them on: the quotation you offer, the order the customer commits to, and the return when goods come back. Each order holds stock for the customer, is shipped from Inventory and invoiced in Receivables, so the order always shows how much has left the warehouse and how much has been billed.

How it fits together

Part	What it is
Customer	Who you sell to. Their currency, payment term, posting profile, price list, sales rep and credit limit fill in every document you raise for them.
Category	A label that groups customers, such as wholesale or retail.
Quotation	An offer to a customer, valid for a set number of days. It becomes a sales order when the customer agrees.
Order	What the customer has agreed to buy. Once confirmed, it is shipped and invoiced line by line.
Return	Goods a customer sends back, usually against an invoice. Settled with a credit or a refund, it raises the credit note, and the refund where the customer had paid.
Price list	Where each line’s price comes from. Kept under Sales ‣ Pricing.

What each step creates

When you	What changes
Save an order	Stock is held in the order’s warehouse for each stocked line, so it cannot be sold twice. A line with not enough free stock shows as Backorder, and is held as stock arrives, oldest orders first.
Ship the order	The shipment takes the goods out of the warehouse, and the order shows the quantity as shipped. See Ship sales orders.
Invoice the shipment	Receivables raises the invoice at the order’s prices; posting it books the receivable and the revenue. See Invoice the shipments of a sales order.
Invoice the last line	The order closes itself once everything on it is shipped and invoiced.
Receive a return	The goods come back into the return’s warehouse.
Settle a return	Unless you chose a replacement, Receivables posts a credit note against the invoice, and pays back what the customer had already paid when you chose a refund.

Quotations and orders do not reach the ledger. The books change when the shipment, the invoice and the credit note post.

Where orders come from

You raise most orders here, from scratch or from a quotation. Orders a field rep takes on a visit in the rep app arrive on the same list as drafts, with the rep and the rep’s warehouse filled in. Orders shoppers place in your store’s app arrive as drafts with no rep, until a rep takes them or you assign them on Dispatch. Point of sale checkouts do not make orders: they post an invoice straight away.

The workspace

Go to Sales ‣ Workspace for the state of your selling at a glance: the number of Orders, those Outstanding (confirmed but not yet fully shipped) with their value, the Total and Tax of your orders, and the count of Quotations and Returns. Needs attention lists orders waiting at each step, such as drafts and orders on Credit hold; click one to open the list filtered to it. Recent orders shows the last ten.

Note

Confirming, cancelling and closing an order, converting or rejecting a quotation, and every step of a return need the Approve access level. A user with Create or Edit prepares the documents, and someone with Approve moves them on. Deleting a draft needs Full.

Before you start

Sales reads its defaults from Finance, Inventory and the Sales settings, so set these up first:

• The payment terms you sell on, and a Customer posting profile for your receivable and revenue accounts.
• At least one warehouse to sell from, and the items you sell.
• A price list under Sales ‣ Pricing ‣ Price lists, so every line is priced for you.
• The defaults new customers start with, in Sales settings.

Where to start

1. Create your customers, or import them from a spreadsheet.
2. Send a quotation when a customer asks for a price.
3. Create an order, or convert the quotation.
4. Confirm the order, then fulfil it.
5. Take back returned goods and settle the return.
6. Set the rules your orders follow in the Sales settings.