Creating a Sales Order

A customer has agreed to buy something and you need it written down: what, how many, at what price, to which address, by when. By the end of this page you will have a finalised sales order that the warehouse can pick against and that accounts can turn into an invoice without retyping a line. A straightforward order takes three or four minutes.

One thing to understand before you start, because it explains most of the questions people ask afterwards. A finalised sales order posts nothing to your accounts and takes nothing out of stock. What it does do is reduce the quantity BigLedger shows as available, so nobody else promises the same units. The money and the stock movement happen when the sales invoice is finalised.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd runs 22 consumer-electronics branches in Malaysia. Today, at branch GS-KV-01, a small corporate customer wants 12 ultraportable laptops at RM 3,450 each and 12 wireless mice at RM 89, delivered to their office on Thursday, on their usual 30-day credit terms. That is the order you will build below.

Before you start

The customer exists in the Customer applet, with their credit terms set. You can create one mid-order, but doing it properly first is faster than doing it twice.
The items exist and there is stock at GS-KV-01, or you know there is not and have agreed a date with the customer.
Your Default Selection is set — branch, location, pricing scheme, pricebook and currency. Ask your administrator if the header comes up blank every time; it is a one-off setting, not something you should be filling in by hand daily.
You hold create and finalise permission on the sales order document type. If the Final button is missing rather than greyed, that is the permission, not a data problem.

Step 1: Open the applet and start the order

Sales > Sales Order (Internal) > Sales Order > Create

The listing you land on is filtered by default, so an order somebody raised last month may not appear until you widen the date range or use Advanced Search.

Click Create. You get a document in TEMP status with a set of tabs across the top — Main Details, Account, Lines, Settlement, Delivery Details, KO For and others. You will use four of them.

Step 2: Fill in the header

Main Details tab

Company, branch and location — GS, GS-KV-01, and the stock location the goods will come out of. These should already be filled in from Default Selection.
Transaction date — the date the customer placed the order. Leave today’s date unless you are entering something from last week.
Reference — the customer’s own purchase order number. Put it in. In three weeks when they query the invoice, this is how you find the order from their paperwork.
Sales agent — who gets credited. Often fills itself from the customer.
Credit terms, credit limit and due date come across from the customer record.

If your company has configured its own Sales Order Status list — things like Awaiting stock or Customer confirming — it appears here as a dropdown. It is a label for your own team; it has no effect on what BigLedger does with the document.

Step 3: Choose the customer

Account tab

Pick the customer in Entity ID. Their billing and shipping addresses come across into the Bill To and Ship To sub-tabs, where you can pick a different delivery address from their address book if this order goes somewhere else.

If the customer has been blacklisted, you will not be able to finalise this order. BigLedger will refuse it with “Customer is blacklisted due to credit limit. Transactions are not allowed for this customer.” — or the credit-term wording, or both. That flag is set by a background job (or by an administrator running the blacklist check on demand) that compares overdue balances against credit terms and limits; it is not recalculated as you type. If you think the flag is wrong, it is cleared in the Customer applet, not here.

About the available-credit figure. Where your company has turned it on, the order screen shows the customer’s available credit — their limit, less what they already owe, less open orders. It is there to inform you. Nothing stops the order because of it. The only automatic refusal is the blacklist flag described above.

Step 4: Add the lines

Lines tab

For each item: search for it by name, code or barcode, then set the quantity. The unit price fills itself from the pricebook your Default Selection points at.

For GadgetSphere’s order that is two lines — 12 laptops at RM 3,450 and 12 mice at RM 89 — giving RM 42,468 before tax.

A few things worth knowing here:

Discounts go on the line, as a percentage or an amount. Your company may set floors: if a price is below the minimum, the replacement price or the moving-average cost, the line is refused unless you hold the matching permission, or unless somebody with approval rights signs it off from the line.
Serial numbers, batches and bins have their own sub-tabs inside the line. If your company requires them to match the line quantity at Final, an incomplete line is marked in red and Final is refused, naming the item.
Stock Availability inside the line shows what is really available at that location — after other open orders. If it is lower than the stock report, that is not a bug; it is the other open orders.
Reserved Stock lets you hold specific quantities, serials or bins against this order. Use it where a customer is paying a deposit for particular units.

Step 5: Take a deposit, if you are taking one

Settlement tab

If the customer is paying something up front, add a settlement line: the date, the amount and the settlement method. Card, cheque and bank-transfer methods have their own required fields, depending on how your company has set them up.

A deposit taken here posts through the receipt-voucher path against the cashbook the settlement method is mapped to. If a settlement method is missing or has no cashbook behind it, that mapping is done once, in the Cashbook applet, by your finance administrator.

For a credit customer like this one, on 30-day terms, there is no deposit — skip the tab.

Step 6: Set the delivery details

Delivery Details tab

Delivery branch and location, the requested delivery date — Thursday — and the person in charge. Anything the driver needs to know goes in the remarks: which entrance, who to call, what time the loading bay is free.

If your company plans deliveries in sessions, the Delivery Plans and Delivery Trips tabs are where this order joins one.

Step 7: Save, check, and finalise

Save keeps the order as a DRAFT. A draft is fully editable and invisible to the warehouse, which is exactly what you want while you are still confirming things with the customer.

When it is right, click Final. BigLedger checks, in this order:

the exchange rate, if the order is not in your company’s base currency;
that the customer is not blacklisted;
serial, batch and bin quantities, where your company requires them;
that the date falls in an open accounting period.

If it passes, the order is numbered, locked, and appears in the Pick Pack Queue and Delivery Items screens for the warehouse. Printing is available; whether you can print a draft depends on a permission.

A FINAL order can be pulled back to DRAFT if your company has enabled that button and you hold the permission. Otherwise the way to change a finalised order is to VOID it — with a reason — and raise a new one. Voiding releases the document links and any reservations.

Step 8: Hand it on

The order is now a source document for whatever comes next:

Sales Invoice — raised from the order rather than typed, so quantities and prices carry across and the order is knocked off line by line. Where you invoice many orders together, the SO Consolidation applet batches them into one invoice per company, branch, customer and agent.
Delivery Order or Packing Order — for fulfilment.
SO Line with SI KO — the screen that shows what has been invoiced against what was ordered, and lets you close a line that is never going to ship.

That last screen is the one to check monthly. An order line that will never be invoiced, left open, keeps eating into available stock for ever.

What success looks like

Thirty seconds, straight after you finalise:

The order has a document number and its status reads FINAL.
Open the Pick Pack Queue. Your two lines are on it.
Open Stock Availability for the laptop at GS-KV-01. The available quantity is 12 lower than the stock balance — which is the order doing its job.

Common mistakes

What goes wrong	What you see	The fix
Expecting the order to post or move stock	Accounts show nothing; the stock report is unchanged	Correct — a sales order does neither. The invoice does
Leaving the order in DRAFT	The warehouse never sees it; it is not in the Pick Pack Queue	Only FINAL orders reach fulfilment
Typing the lines when a quotation exists	The quotation stays open for ever; prices drift from what was quoted	Use the KO For tab to pull the quotation in
Leaving the customer’s reference blank	Nobody can match your invoice to their purchase order	Fill in Reference at Step 2, every time
Finalising for a blacklisted customer	“Customer is blacklisted due to credit limit…”	Clear it in the Customer applet — and find out why the credit-limit job (`ENTITY_BLACKLIST_CUSTOMER_PROCESSOR`, run on demand or by the scheduler; no schedule is in the source) flagged them
Serial or batch quantities short of the line quantity	Final refused, line marked red, the item named	Complete the Serial Number or Batches sub-tab on that line
Never closing abandoned order lines	Available stock stays permanently below the stock balance	Close the lines in SO Line with SI KO, or void the order
The invoice cannot find a FINAL order	The order is FINAL, not voided and not fully invoiced, yet absent from the invoice’s KO For picker	Your company’s Knock Off Configuration (Organisation > Company > Knock Off Configuration) has no enabled Sales Order → Sales Invoice row, so FINAL created no open-queue rows — a one-off fix for your administrator