Sales orders
Before you start, open this page: Sales / Sales orders.
Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.
A sales order is the document your warehouse works from. It says what you have promised to supply, from where, and by when.
It sits between the customer’s order and the invoice. It earns its place as soon as getting the goods out stops being simple.
What it adds over an order
A sales order number, and links to the documents around it. The order it came from. A quote. The customer’s own purchase order. And an affiliate, if it came through a partner page.
- Contact is the customer as a proper record, not as typed-in details.
- From location and business location say where it is being supplied from.
- Order date and expected delivery date set the promise.
- Lines are what will be supplied.
- Currency and payment options say how it gets paid.
- Documents hold anything attached.
Why it exists at all
For a sale over the counter, it does not need to.
It earns its place the moment a sale involves stock in a particular place, or a promised date, or somebody other than the seller getting the goods out.
The sales order is what your warehouse works from.
It is also what lets you answer “what have we promised that we have not shipped yet”. An invoice cannot answer that, because an invoice is about money, not goods.
The location field is not just paperwork
Which location supplies the order decides which stock moves.
Get it wrong and you have set aside goods in a warehouse that will not be shipping 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 has been set up, the real source is worked out for you, so whoever raises the order does not need to know the arrangement.
Stock is set aside, not moved
Raising a sales order does not take goods off the shelf. It marks them as spoken for.
That difference is the whole point of the document.
Your “on hand” number still shows what is physically there. Your “reserved” number shows how much of it is already promised.
Stock moves when the goods actually move, which is what the inventory course is about.
Try it
On staging.feeprime.com, raise a sales order from an existing order rather than from scratch, and notice what carries across.
Then look at the stock numbers for a line before and after. On hand unchanged, reserved up.