The sales order is the cornerstone of the sales management functionality. In principle, a sales order can be used to register both a physical and financial transaction. Sales orders can be generated from sales quotes and blanket sales orders or they can be created manually.

Generating Sales Orders from Quotes and Blanket Orders

A sales quote is typically created as a draft order, which provides a customer with prices, terms of sale, and description of items. If the customer accepts the quote, it can be converted into a sales order. For more information, see How to: Make Offers and How to: Convert Sales Quotes to Sales Orders.

A blanket sales order represents a framework for a long-term agreement between the company and a customer. Blanket orders are typically created when your customer has committed to buy large quantities that are to be delivered in several smaller shipments over a certain period of time.

On the blanket order, each separate shipment can be set up as an order line, which can then be converted into a sales order at the time of shipping. For more information, see How to: Create Blanket Sales Orders and How to: Convert Blanket Sales Orders to Sales Orders.

Creating Sales Orders Manually

You create sales orders in the Sales Order window. For more information, see How to: Create Sales Orders Manually.

Prepayments

A prepayment is a payment made for an order. Usually the payment must be made before the order is processed. This often occurs if the customer is a late payer, if the goods are custom made, or if the goods are ordered from a vendor who requires cash payment.

After a prepayment has been set up on a sales order, you can create a prepayments invoice for the amount to be prepaid on the sales order. For more information, see How to: Define Prepayment Percentages and How to: Create Prepayment Invoices.

Drop Shipments

A drop shipment is the shipment of an item or a consignment of items from your vendor to one of your customers. Drop shipments are relevant if you want to avoid handling the order, such as stocking and delivering, but still want to fulfill your customer's order request and include the transaction in a calculation of cost of goods sold and profit.

Through dynamic cost calculation, inventory value is always updated. This is very important because the drop shipped items do not physically enter your inventory, even though the sales and purchase transactions of the drop shipment are registered as regular orders.

Drop shipments can be created on a sales order or together with purchase orders and the Requisition Worksheet. For more information, see How to: Create Drop Shipments and How to: Create Sales Orders for Drop Shipments.

Sales Order Planning

You can use Sales Order Planning window to plan and create production orders to supply demand represented by the sales order. For more information, see How to: Create Production Orders from Sales Orders.

Posting Sales Orders

When you have completed all the lines and entered all the information on the sales order, you can post it. This means that you will create a shipment and an invoice. The Qty. to Ship and the Qty. to Invoice fields on a sales order represent the quantities that the posting function will process. The values in these fields are filled in automatically when the quantity is entered in the Quantity field on the sales order line. For more information, see How to: Post Sales Orders.

Partial Shipments

If necessary, the quantities in the Qty. to Ship field can be reduced before posting, thereby partially shipping the order. To enable partial shipment posting, you must select Partial in the Shipping Advice field on the sales order header.

An order can have as many shipments as are necessary to complete the order. Upon partial order posting, the Quantity Shipped field will specify the completed part of the order. For more information, see How to: Use Partial Shipments.

Shipping

In order to handle outbound requests, the sales order must be released for the request to be visible to the warehouse personnel and to initiate the shipping process. The first step is to see an overview of the orders released for shipment. This can be either done from the shipment list or from the pick worksheet, showing all released shipping orders. To continue the process of shipping, the items must be picked. For more information, see How to: Prepare Shipments and How to: Pick Items with Inventory Picks and How to: Pick Items for Warehouse Shipment.

Batch Posting

If you want to post multiple sales documents, you may consider batch posting the documents instead of posting the documents one by one. For more information, see How to: Batch Post Sales Orders, Invoices, and Credit Memos.

See Also