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Using a Sales Order System

The simplest transaction for a sales and inventory accounting system is taking an order for which all items are in stock, printing the invoice and shipping the items.  However, complicating factors inevitably arise.  What do you do when an ordered item is out of stock?  How quickly can you get manufacturing orders in production?  Can you add items to an open sales order if you receive a call from your customer requesting additions to an earlier order?  How are special product options handled?

The sales order system is a collection of programs that provides you with powerful yet easy to use methods of integrating your inventory, manufacturing, and sales operations.  The sales order system contains the following basic elements:

Backorder tracking

Instant invoice capability

Multiple invoices against a single sales order

Automatic conversion to production work orders

Features & Options capability

A sales order is a record of a customer order which can have multiple delivery invoices applied against it.  It serves as a record of invoiced and shipped products, and can also serve as a record of inventory out of stock and backordered.  The sections below will introduce you to these various sales order features.

Backorder Tracking

The sales order quantity for an item can be in the Ship column or in the Backorder column.  Units in the ship column have not yet been shipped, while units in the backorder column are items that failed to make a shipment and were backordered.

The backorder column is primarily for tracking purposes and distinguishes backorders from open orders.  A backorder listing is available through SO-O-B, Print Backorder List, and On Backorder is a status field within the inventory system.

Instant Invoice Capability

If you set the Ready to Invoice? flag to Y when entering a sales order, the program checks stock on all line items and places all available units in the ship column and all items without stock in the backorder column.  All lines are flagged by the program as ready to invoice.  You can then go directly to the print invoice program and bypass the release sales orders function.

The instant invoice capability can be useful for point-of-sale situations or for spare parts type orders that are to be shipped out of stock.

Multiple Invoicing and Adding to an Existing Sales Order

An open sales order is any customer order that has at least one open item that has not been posted.  In order to allow you to recall a sales order for alteration or review, a sales order number is automatically assigned or manually assigned by the user.   New line items can be added to an open sales order.  You can also delete or change items that are on the order if they have not yet been invoiced.  When all goods are invoiced on the sales order, the sales order is closed and you can no longer add line items or make any changes to it.  The ability to add line items to an open sales order gives you a convenient and flexible way to record your customer orders.

Pricing

A complete pricing system is available for use by the Sales Orders module.  The pricing system includes a base price, up to 999 price lists with ten quantity price breaks per item, discount tables with multiple discount levels by item class, and contract pricing for specific items for specific customers.

Automatic Conversion to Production Work Orders

SO-N  Convert Sales Orders to Work Orders converts sales orders directly to production work orders in the Work Orders modules.  The program will run through the sales order line items and will produce a work order for each item that is a finished good, subassembly, or manufactured item.  Multiple shipping dates per item can be accommodated.  For make-to-order manufacturers this conversion capability eliminates the tedious work of entering one order in the accounting system and the same order in the manufacturing system.  It allows you to enter multiple items on the same sales order, yet it produces individual work orders for each item in a format (shop traveler) that is useful for the production department.

Features & Options Capability

Features & Options is a module which allows bills of material to be designed to accommodate multiple options within products.  During sales order entry options are presented in windows for selection.  As each option is selected, it feeds into the sales order underneath the parent product.  Options may be defined within options, and you can specify option prices to be itemized or to be added to the price of the parent product.

After the options are selected and the sales order is saved, the sales order can be converted to a work order, during which all the options are passed over to the work order's bill of material where they are combined with the parent product’s standard components.

Features & Options allow custom bills of material to be built on-the-fly within sales order entry and is a useful tool for custom manufacturers whose products are subject to a variety of options.  The Features & Options capability eliminates complex item numbering, results in more accurate ordering and pricing, and gets orders to the factory floor more quickly.