Sales orders

You’ll need: Sales orders — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

A sales order is the fulfilment document: what you have committed to supply, from where, and by when. It sits between the customer’s order and the invoice, and it earns its place as soon as fulfilment stops being trivial.

What it adds over an order

Sales order number, and links to the documents around it — the order it came from, a quote, a purchase order (the customer’s own), and an affiliate if it came through a partner page.

Contact is the customer as a record rather than as typed-in details. From location and business location say where it is being fulfilled from. Order date and expected delivery date set the commitment. Lines are what will be supplied, currency and payment options how it will be paid, and documents hold anything attached.

Why it exists at all

For a counter sale it does not need to. It earns its place the moment a sale involves stock in a specific place, a promised date, or fulfilment by somebody other than whoever sold it.

The sales order is what your warehouse works from. It is also what lets you answer “what have we promised that we have not yet shipped” — a question an invoice cannot answer, because an invoice is about money rather than goods.

The location field is not paperwork

Which location fulfils the order decides which stock moves. Get it wrong and you have reserved goods in a warehouse that will not ship them, while the branch that does ship shows stock it no longer has.

Some locations never hold stock and are always served from somewhere else; where that is configured, the real source is worked out for you so the person raising the order does not need to know the arrangement.

Stock is reserved, not yet moved

Raising a sales order does not take goods off the shelf. It marks them as spoken for.

That distinction is the whole point of the document. Your on-hand figure still shows what is physically there; your reserved figure shows how much of it is already promised. Stock moves when the goods actually move, which is the inventory course’s subject.

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