Sales Orders

What it is and what it's for

The Sales Order records what you're going to sell a customer, at what price and under what terms, without moving inventory or posting an accounting entry yet. It's the middle step between offering a price (Quote) and billing (Credit or Cash Invoice): it lets you commit the sale, put it through an authorization workflow, and separately track whether it has been shipped and whether it has been invoiced.

It gives you central control over your sales before they turn into cash or outgoing merchandise: it stops a sales rep from changing prices without approval, prevents selling beyond a customer's credit limit, and lets you partially ship a large order or invoice it in several parts as it's fulfilled.

How to use it

1. Open Sales Orders from the Sales menu and click New. You can also create an order directly from an already-approved Quote (it copies the customer, address, payment term and items automatically) or import one from a file via automatic recognition (OCR), if your company has that feature enabled.
2. Fill in the header: customer, date, subsidiary and shipping location, sales rep, currency and exchange rate, payment term, reference and notes.
3. On the Items tab, add the order's lines: item, quantity, unit of measure, price, tax and discount percent. The system automatically calculates the subtotal, discount, net amount, tax and total.
4. Fill in, if applicable, the shipping and billing addresses, additional sales reps (if your company splits a sale among several reps), and payment installments (if the order will be collected in several terms).
5. Attach any supporting files you need (a customer's purchase order, for example) and save the order. As long as you don't send it for authorization, it stays in Draft status.
6. Send it to Pending Authorization (or authorize it directly if you have the permission) to make it final. Once authorized, you can generate the invoice, the dispatch note or other related documents straight from the same order.

Authorization and validations when authorizing

Authorizing an order is what makes it final for the customer and enables generating its derived documents. When you authorize, the system automatically validates:

• That the order isn't voided and that it has a customer assigned.
• If your company has credit limit validation enabled (a company preference): that the customer's new balance (their open invoices plus this order's total) doesn't exceed their credit limit, or that the customer isn't flagged "No Credit." You can include the amount of other pending-to-invoice sales orders in this calculation if your company configures it that way.
• If your company has overdue invoices validation enabled (a company preference): that the customer doesn't have open invoices whose days overdue exceed the configured limit for blocking new sales.
• Both validations are automatically skipped when the order's payment term is cash ("Cash Terms").
• A user with the matching permission (exceed credit limit or sell with overdue invoices, at the Authorize level) can override each validation on a case-by-case basis when authorizing.

Automatic authorization attempts

If your company turned on the option to try to authorize orders automatically in the company preferences, every time an order is saved the system tries to authorize it right away. When the attempt does not pass (credit limit, overdue invoices, a discount above the authorized one, etc.), the order stays Pending Authorization and a message with the reason is shown at that moment.

So that reason is not lost, every automatic attempt (successful or failed) is recorded in the order's Log tab as a row with the "Automatic authorization attempt" action, its date and the user who saved the order. On that row, an button opens a detail with the result (Authorized or Not Authorized) and, if it was not authorized, the rejection reason — similar to how the Log shows the change detail of an edit.

Validations when saving

• The customer is required.
• The order must have at least one item line with a valid quantity and price.
• Each line's discount percent must be between 0% and 100%.
• The number of lines can't exceed the maximum number of items allowed per document.
• The shipping location must belong to the order's subsidiary and be enabled for sales.
• The exchange rate must be greater than zero (if left at 0, the system sets it to 1 automatically).
• If the order is a Consignment order, the reception location is required and must belong to the same customer as the order.
• If your company restricts which subsidiaries a customer can buy from, the system validates that the order's subsidiary is authorized for that customer.

Key fields

Order statuses

Documents you can generate from an authorized order

• Credit Invoice (not available if the order's payment term is cash).
• Cash Invoice.
• Promotion Invoice, if your company has that feature active.
• Dispatch note, with or without a pick list.
• Purchase Order, to source what you're about to sell the customer.
• Project, Production Order or Service Request, if your company has those modules active.
• Transfer of goods to or from the reception location, on Consignment orders.

Key capabilities

• Its own authorization workflow: Draft, Pending Authorization, Authorized or Rejected, with an assignable authorizing user.
• Separate tracking of how much of each order has been dispatched and invoiced, allowing partial deliveries and invoices.
• Automatic credit-limit and overdue-invoice validation for the customer when authorizing, with a permission-based override.
• Direct conversion to Invoice, Dispatch, Purchase Order and other documents without re-entering the information.
• Generation from an approved Quote or through automatic recognition (OCR) of a file, if your company has those features active.
• Reports of orders pending authorization, dispatch or billing, filterable by customer, sales rep, subsidiary, location and territory.
• Sending the order to the customer by email, public link or WhatsApp, and printing with customizable templates, including a pick-list format for the warehouse.
• Order account statement: shows the order and its linked customer prepayments, always in the company's local currency. Each document is converted using the exchange rate recorded on the document itself (the order's rate for the order, each prepayment's own rate for that prepayment), and the currency, original amount and rate used are shown.

Availability and permissions

• Requires the "Sales Orders" permission of your user group (View, Add, Edit, Delete or Void depending on the action).
• Changing prices, changing an item's description, or changing an order's sales rep each require their own additional permission.
• Consignment orders, multiple sales reps per order, payment installments and sales territory are only available if your company has those capabilities enabled.
• The Subsidiary column and filter only appear if your company has subsidiaries enabled.
• Automatic recognition (OCR) import of an order from a file requires that feature to be enabled.
• Credit limit and overdue invoice validations only apply if your company turned them on in Company Preferences.
• The list and reports always respect your session's subsidiary, location and sales rep.

Tips and common mistakes