One sale, end to end

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

This course follows a single sale through the system. Before the detail, here is the shape of the whole thing — because the commonest mistake in sales is using the wrong document for where you are.

The documents, and when each one is right

   QUOTE          "here is what it would cost"
     |             no commitment either way
     v
   ORDER          "yes, I want it"
     |             the customer has committed
     v
   SALES ORDER     what we will fulfil, and from where
     |
     v
   INVOICE        "here is what you owe"
     |
     v
   PAYMENT        money settling that invoice

Not every sale uses all five. A shop selling over the counter goes straight to an invoice. A contractor may quote, then invoice, and never raise an order.

The chain exists so that each step can carry what the previous one agreed, not so that you must climb every rung.

For physical goods, the order is different

There is one important departure from that picture, and it is the default rather than an option you switch on.

An invoice must not change. An order changes right up to dispatch — a substitution, a quantity correction, a line that never made it onto the van. Issuing the invoice the moment a customer pays therefore freezes the wrong document, and the only fix afterwards is to void it and reissue.

So when an order carries physical goods, the invoice becomes the last document rather than the first:

   ORDER  --> customer pays --> the money is held as an
     |                          ADVANCE against the order
     v
   goods are fulfilled (and may change while that happens)
     |
     v
   INVOICE raised last, for what actually went out
     |
     v
   the advance is applied to it — no second payment

Some things do not work this way, and for a good reason. A membership, an event ticket or a credit top-up is delivered by the invoice itself — the ticket is minted when the invoice is approved, the membership starts when it is paid. Withholding the invoice would withhold the thing the customer just bought. Those invoice at payment, as you would expect.

An organisation can opt out and invoice at payment for everything, but the default is to defer.

Why not just write an invoice for everything?

Because the documents answer different questions, and collapsing them loses the answers.

A quote records what you offered and until when. An order records what the customer committed to. An invoice records what is legally due — the document your accounts and your customer’s accounts both key off.

The one rule worth learning first

Documents point at each other rather than copying each other. An invoice knows which order it came from; a sales order knows its quote. That is what lets you follow a sale backwards when a customer queries it.

When you create a document from another, use the link. Retyping the figures into a fresh document breaks the chain, and nothing on the screen will tell you it is broken.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, look at each of the four list pages without creating anything. Notice they are the same list page you already know. The only new thing in this course is what the documents mean.