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 Step 8 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 what you will see afterwards. A finalised sales order’s lines post nothing to your accounts and take nothing out of stock. (A deposit taken on the order is the one exception, and Step 5 explains it.) 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.

A sales order, at a glance

1. Step 1: Open the applet and start the order
2. Step 2: Fill in the header
3. Step 3: Choose the customer
4. Step 4: Add the lines
5. Step 5: Take a deposit, if you are taking one
6. Step 6: Set the delivery details
7. Step 7: Save, check, and finalise
8. Step 8: Hand it on

The order runs across three pages: Steps 1 to 5 are on this one, Steps 6 to 8 on Finalise the order and hand it on, and a deposit followed from collection to refund on Follow a deposit to close.

    flowchart LR
  QT["Quotation"] -.->|"KO For"| SO["Sales Order<br/>FINAL: its lines post nothing<br/>and take nothing out of stock"]
  RV["Receipt Voucher<br/>a deposit, if you take one"] -.->|"contra"| SO
  SO -->|"Require Delivery YES,<br/>Send To Queue"| PPQ["Pick Pack Queue"]
  SO -.->|"for fulfilment"| DO["Delivery Order<br/>or Packing Order"]
  SO -->|"KO For"| SI["<b>Sales Invoice</b><br/><b>the money and the stock movement</b>"]
  SO -.->|"deposit credit, on Yes to<br/>Transfer Available Credit?"| SI
  

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. If the header comes up blank every time, this is the fix, and it is a one-off: Sales Order (Internal) → Settings → Default Selection, which pre-fills all five on every new order (what each field feeds). It is an applet setting rather than a personal one, so you need admin rights on the applet — if you do not have them, that is the one sentence to send your administrator, and it takes them a minute.
• You hold create and update permission on the sales order document type; there is no separate finalise permission. If the Final button is missing on a draft you can edit, check whether the document is locked, and then ask your administrator whether the applet’s permission settings hide it from your role (who can finalise).

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. A person sets that flag on the customer’s Main tab in Customer Maintenance, usually whoever runs credit control; a background job can set it too, but only where somebody has scheduled it or runs it by hand. It is not recalculated as you type. Ask your credit controller why the customer is on stop: the flag is lifted on the customer record by someone who can edit customers, not here (Stopping Supply to a Customer).

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, or Receipt Voucher tab

For a credit customer like this one, on 30-day terms, there is no deposit — skip this step. When there is one, the order gives you two places to record it, and they are not two screens for the same thing. They differ in which document holds the money and in what a later void does to it. Following a deposit from collection to close walks one deposit all the way through. The short version:

Use the Receipt Voucher tab by default. The receipt has its own number to quote to the customer, it survives a cancelled order, and it posts through the path every other customer receipt uses. Leave the Settlement tab alone for now. A deposit keyed there with some payment methods does not reach the ledger today: the order’s Trace Document tab shows an empty Journal Txn grid. What that does to your books, and what to do about deposits already taken that way, is on Follow a deposit to close.

Either way it is a company decision, not a counter decision: whoever runs your finance function settles the route before the first deposit is taken and writes it down. Either tab can be hidden in the applet’s settings, so a company that chooses one route can remove the other from the screen.

A receipt raised from the Receipt Voucher tab saves the order first. Then, depending on two applet settings, BigLedger finalises both the receipt and the order, only the receipt, or neither. Open the receipt from the tab and check its status before the customer leaves: a draft receipt has put nothing in the bank.

On either tab, the settlement method decides which cashbook the money lands in. If a method is missing, or has no cashbook behind it, your finance administrator sets that up once, in the Cashbook applet.

Next: Steps 6 to 8: set the delivery details, finalise, and hand the order on.

Following a deposit from collection to close

A second GadgetSphere order: 10 flagship smartphones at RM 4,000 each (tax left out), a RM 20,000 deposit, four phones delivered and invoiced for RM 16,000, the other six cancelled, and RM 4,000 owed back to the customer. Four jobs follow, and none of them is done for you: record the deposit and check it reached the bank, use it against the invoice, refund what is left, and close what will never ship. The whole walk-through, with the void-or-close decision, is on Follow a deposit to close.

What success looks like

Thirty seconds, straight after you finalise:

1. The order has a document number and its status reads FINAL.
2. You clicked Send To Queue on the Delivery Details tab, then opened the Pick Pack Queue. Your two lines are on it. If they are not, check that both lines have Require Delivery set to YES.
3. 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

Leaving an order FINAL but never sent to the queue, never closing abandoned lines, and an invoice that cannot find the order are with Steps 6 to 8; the deposit mistakes (voiding a Settlement-tab deposit, answering No to Transfer Available Credit?, refunding to the wrong document, closing lines and forgetting the money) are with the deposit walk-through.

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