Quotes and sales orders
Selling starts at a quote and ends at an invoice, and the same document carries through the whole way. Nothing is re-typed between stages, which is the point.
Quotes
A quote captures the customer, the lines, and the pricing. Prices default from the customer's price tier, so the person quoting does not have to remember what this customer pays. Line notes let you record the detail that matters later — a finish, a tolerance, a delivery instruction — and those notes follow the line onto the order and the picking slip.
When a customer accepts, convert the quote to a sales order rather than re-keying it. The link between the two is kept.
Sales orders
A sales order records what the customer has committed to buy, their PO number, and the delivery date. From there the order carries three separate pieces of state, and keeping them separate is deliberate:
| Status | Answers |
|---|---|
| Order status | Where the order is in your own workflow — the stages are yours to define. |
| Delivery status | Whether goods have gone out: pending, partial, shipped or delivered. |
| Invoicing status | Whether it has been billed. |
An order can be fully delivered but not yet invoiced, or invoiced in advance and not yet picked. One combined status would hide exactly the cases you need to chase.
Order approval
If you want a second pair of eyes before an order can be shipped, turn on approvals in Settings → Order Approvals. Once enabled:
- New orders are created pending approval.
- Only users holding the approver role can approve, and you can require more than one approval before an order clears.
- Unapproved orders do not appear in pick and pack, so nothing can be dispatched on an order that has not cleared.
- Every approval and rejection is logged with the person and the time, and the order list shows who has approved so far.
Approvers get a dedicated Approvals screen and a count in the header, so the queue is visible rather than something to remember.
Products on order
Sales Orders → Products on Order flips the view around: instead of orders with products inside them, it shows products with the outstanding demand against them. This is the screen for answering “how many of these do we owe customers, and do we have them?” — which is where purchasing and production decisions actually start.
What happens next
Once an order is approved and the stock exists, it moves to pick, pack and dispatch. If it needs to be built first, see Production. If it needs to be bought first, see Inventory and purchasing.