The sales order is the cornerstone of sales management functionality in the program. In principle, a sales order can be used to register both a physical and financial transaction. Sales orders can be created manually or generated from Sales Quotes and Blanket Sales Orders.
The program offers flexibility in creating orders in all aspects. These are described below.
Sales Quotes: 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.
Blanket 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. Often blanket orders cover only one item with predetermined delivery dates. The main reason for using a blanket order rather than a sales order is that quantities entered on a blanket order do not affect item availability and thus can be used as a worksheet for monitoring, forecasting, and planning purposes. 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.
Sales orders can be created manually on the Sales Order window.
A prepayment is a payment made for an order. Usually the payment must be made before the order is processed. This often happens 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. Once 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.
A drop shipment is the shipment of an item or a consignment of items from your vendor directly to one of your customers. Drop shipments are relevant in situations where you want to avoid actual handling of 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.
The program also ensures the correct inventory value and item cost calculation. This becomes particularly important as, even though the sales and purchase transactions of the drop shipment are registered in the program as any regular order, the drop shipped items do not physically enter your inventory.
Drop shipments can be created on a sales order or in conjunction with purchase orders and the Requisition Worksheet.
Using the Sales Order Planning window, you can create production orders to handle open demand resulting from the sales order.
When you have completed all the lines and entered all the information on the sales order, you can post it; that is, 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 by the program at the time when the quantity is entered in the Quantity field for a sales line.
If necessary, the quantities in the Qty. to Ship field can be reduced prior to posting, thereby partially shipping the order. For the program to make the posting of a partial shipment, you must select Partial in the Shipping Advice field on the 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 portion of the order.
Partial shipments can be invoiced by reducing the quantity in the Qty. to Invoice field prior to posting.
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 get an overview of the orders released for shipment. This can either be 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.
If you need to post a large number of sales documents, you may consider batch posting the documents rather than posting the documents one by one.
About Forecasting Functionality
Calculating Order Promising Dates
The Information Pane in Sales Documents
Using Alternative Ship-to Addresses