Processing a Delivery Order
Goods are going out to a customer and you need the paperwork that says which goods, to whom, on what date, and by which route. By the end of this page you will have a finalised delivery order, its lines sitting in the warehouse queue, and a delivery job created from them. A delivery order pulled from an existing sales order takes about three minutes.
Read this first, because it reverses what most people assume. A delivery order moves no stock and posts nothing. Finalising one changes nothing in your ledger and nothing in your stock balance. What it does is commit the quantity and drive fulfilment. The stock movement happens on the sales invoice (or on a goods-issue document, if your company uses those).
And one more thing that surprises people: finalising a delivery order does not put its lines in front of the warehouse. That takes a separate click — Send To Queue — covered in Step 5. Skip it and the goods never appear on anyone’s picking list.
Meet GadgetSphere
GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd is delivering 12 ultraportable laptops and 12 wireless mice to a corporate customer’s office on Thursday, out of branch GS-KV-01, against a sales order raised on Monday.
Before you start
- The source document is FINAL. A draft sales order has no open quantity, so its lines will not appear when you search for it.
- Your company’s Knock Off Configuration allows Sales Order → Delivery Order. Organisation > Company > Knock Off Configuration is what makes a finalised order visible to the delivery order at all. If nobody has set this up, every order will be “missing” from the picker no matter how final it is. Ask your administrator once; it is a one-time setting.
- You know the delivery branch and location the goods leave from.
- You have the delivery date and contact — the person receiving, their phone number, and anything the driver needs to know.
Step 1: Open the applet and create the document
Sales > Delivery Order (Internal) > Delivery Order > Create
The listing shows Posting Status and Status as two separate columns, and the document short code OBDODR. Those are two different things: posting status is DRAFT or FINAL; status is whether the record is active, voided or discarded.
Step 2: Pull the lines from the sales order — do not type them
KO For panel
Search for the sales order and knock it off. This copies the customer and the lines across and creates the link — which is what makes the source order’s open quantity fall as the delivery order consumes it.
You can knock off from a sales order, a sales invoice, a sales return, a purchase GRN, or another delivery order. Which of those tabs you actually see depends on the company’s Knock Off Configuration.
Type the lines by hand and the sales order stays open for ever. Nothing warns you.
If the order is not in the list, there are four causes, and the first three are the ones people check: the order is still DRAFT; it has been closed; it has already been fully delivered or invoiced. The fourth is the one people miss: the company’s Knock Off Configuration has no Sales Order → Delivery Order row, so FINAL on the order created nothing for this document to find. That last one produces no error anywhere — the order simply never appears.
Step 3: Fill in the header and the delivery details
Main Details and Delivery Details panels
- Branch and location — where the goods leave from.
- Transaction date — the date of the delivery.
- Account — the customer, which comes across from the source document.
- Delivery details — address, requested date, person in charge, and the instructions the driver needs.
On the Delivery Details panel each line also carries two columns that matter in Step 5: Require Delivery (YES or NO) and Qty To Deliver. Lines come in with Qty To Deliver equal to the full line quantity. Set Require Delivery to YES on every line the warehouse must pick — for GadgetSphere, both of them.
Which panels you see, and in what order, is a company setting — so your screen may not have all of them.
Step 4: Finalise
Click Final. BigLedger checks, among other things, that the customer is not blacklisted — delivery orders are one of the four document types the credit blacklist covers, alongside sales orders, sales invoices and cash bills. Serial, batch and stock-balance checks run only if your company has turned on serial-number validation at FINAL for this applet.
Finalising posts nothing and moves nothing. It locks the document, numbers it, and — if the company’s Knock Off Configuration has a Delivery Order → Sales Invoice row — makes its lines available for the invoice to knock off later.
If the Final button is missing rather than greyed out, it has been hidden by a company setting — ask your administrator rather than looking for a data problem.
Step 5: Send the lines to the warehouse queue
Delivery Details panel > Send To Queue
This is the step nothing does for you. Open the finalised delivery order, go to the Delivery Details panel, check that Require Delivery is YES and Qty To Deliver is right on each line, and click Send To Queue.
That writes one row per line into the warehouse’s pick-pack queue, carrying the Qty To Deliver as the pending balance. Only lines marked YES go; lines marked NO are ignored. Once a line has been sent, the button will not send it again from this screen.
Two things to know:
- Send it after FINAL, not before. The Delivery Order applet does not stop you sending a draft’s lines to the queue. If you then edit the draft, the queue is already holding the old quantities.
- Send it once. Sending the same line twice from different sessions adds to the pending balance rather than replacing it, and the warehouse will pick it twice.
Step 6: Turn it into a delivery job
Delivery Order (Internal) > Pick Pack Queue
This is where the warehouse picks the work up. The queue shows the pending quantity for each line alongside the stock balance at that location and across the company. If your lines are not here, go back to Step 5 — nothing else puts them here.
- Set Qty To Deliver on the rows you are dispatching. You cannot enter more than the pending balance — the field refuses it.
- Choose the Delivery Type: internal delivery, external delivery, or customer pickup.
- Click Create Delivery Job.
That creates the job with its pickup and delivery dates and the recipient’s details, links it back to the queue rows, and reduces each row’s pending balance by the quantity that went onto the job. From there the job flows to the delivery and installation applets, and to the driver’s own applet, where the assigned driver can update the delivery from the road.
Step 7: Invoice it
The delivery order does not become an invoice by itself. Raise the sales invoice — knocking off the sales order or the delivery order — and that is the document that takes the stock out and posts the revenue, the receivable and the tax.
Some businesses invoice before delivery and some after. Both work; what matters is that somebody does it, because until they do, the goods are gone from the shelf physically and still on the books.
Correcting and cancelling
- A draft can be edited freely, or discarded.
- A FINAL document can be voided, with the caveat that nothing financial is being reversed — there was no journal and no stock movement. Voiding runs a background job that deletes the delivery order’s own open lines, marks its knock-off links as deleted, and re-opens the source order’s quantity — so the order can be delivered again on a new document. Voiding does not touch anything already in the pick-pack queue: if you sent the lines to the warehouse, cancel the delivery job (or the queue row) as well, or the warehouse will pick a voided order.
- Close is different from void: it ends the knock-off lifecycle of a finalised document — the right action when part of a delivery order will never ship and you want the remainder off the queue.
What success looks like
Two minutes after finalising and sending to the queue:
- Open the Pick Pack Queue. Your lines are on it, with the quantities you expect. If the queue is empty, you skipped Step 5.
- Open the delivery order’s Doc Link panel. The source sales order is listed against it — that link is what closes the order off, and its absence is what leaves orders open for ever.
- Open Stock Availability for one of the items. The available quantity reflects the commitment; the stock balance has not changed — which is correct.
If the stock balance moved, something other than this document did it.
Common mistakes
| What goes wrong | What you see | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Finalising and stopping | The warehouse never sees the order; the Pick Pack Queue is empty | FINAL does not feed the queue. Open Delivery Details and click Send To Queue |
| Expecting the delivery order to reduce stock | The stock report is unchanged after dispatch | Correct — the sales invoice moves stock. Invoice the delivery |
| The sales order is not in the KO For picker | Nothing to knock off, no error | DRAFT, closed, already consumed — or the company’s Knock Off Configuration has no Sales Order → Delivery Order row |
| Typing the lines instead of knocking off | The sales order stays open for ever; quantities drift | Use the KO For panel |
| Goods delivered, never invoiced | Stock on the books that is not in the building | Make invoicing part of the same day’s routine |
| Entering more than the pending quantity in the queue | The field will not accept it | Deliver in two jobs, or fix the underlying order |
| Voiding when you meant to close | The whole document leaves the flow | Close ends the knock-off lifecycle of a finalised document; Void removes it |
| A blacklisted customer | Final refused with ENTITY_BLACKLISTED | The Blacklist Overdue Customer job flagged them for being over their credit limit. Clear it on the customer’s Main tab once the account is settled — and know that the next run of the job re-evaluates everyone, so a hand-set flag does not last |