Sales Operations Overview

If you work in sales admin, this page is the map of your day: which document to raise for which customer, what each one does (and does not do) behind the scenes, and where to look at the end of the day to know it all went through. It is an orientation page, not a procedure — each task has its own guide, linked as we go.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd sells consumer electronics through 22 branches. On any given day the sales desk handles walk-ins paying at the counter, corporate accounts buying on 30-day terms, scheduled deliveries out of the fulfilment centre, and the occasional return. All four are below.

The one thing that explains everything else

Only two sales documents move stock and post to your accounts: the Sales Invoice and the POS Cash Bill.

Everything else in the sales chain — the quotation, the sales order, the goods delivery note, the outbound delivery order — records intent and controls process. They are genuinely useful; they close each other off, they drive picking, they give the customer paperwork. But no money and no stock moves until an invoice or a cash bill is finalised.

There is one qualification, and it matters day to day: an open sales order reduces the quantity BigLedger shows as available, even though it does not reduce the stock balance. That is how the same unit does not get promised twice.

Which route for which customer

A walk-in paying at the counter. POS cash bill. One document: it takes the payment, takes the stock out and posts, all at once. → Cash sales workflow

A customer ordering for later delivery. Sales order, then a delivery document, then a sales invoice. → Creating a sales order · Standard sales workflow

A corporate account on terms. Same as above, but the money comes later as a receipt voucher applied against the invoice. → Credit sales workflow · Recording a customer payment

Only some of the order is in stock. Deliver and invoice what you have; the order line stays open for the rest. → Partial delivery workflow

The customer wants to return something. A sales return brings the goods back in; a credit note reduces what they owe without goods moving. Which one you need depends on whether anything is physically coming back. → Returns and exchanges workflow

The product needs installing. The delivery and installation applets carry the scheduling. → Installation scheduling workflow

The shape of a sales day

Morning. Look at what is due to go out. The Sales Order applet’s Pick Pack Queue shows the order lines that have been sent to the warehouse, grouped for picking, and Delivery Items is the line-level list with batch and bin detail. A line reaches the Pick Pack Queue only when somebody opens the finalised order’s Delivery Details panel and clicks Send To Queue — the applet refuses to send a draft, and finalising alone sends nothing. An order that was finalised and never sent is the single most common reason something did not get picked. Delivery scheduling lives in trip listing.

During the day. New orders get raised, existing ones get amended while they are still drafts, and goods go out against delivery orders. Deposits taken on an order post through the receipt-voucher path against the cashbook behind the settlement method.

Invoicing. Raise the invoice from the order rather than typing it. That is what closes the order line off and what lets accounts match quantities later. Where you invoice many orders for the same customer together, the SO Consolidation applet turns the finalised orders you select — filtered by company, branch, customer and sales agent — into one invoice per customer.

End of day. The counter reconciles in Daily Cashier Reports — Cashier Collection for every settlement taken, and the Z Report for the branch’s day. Payments that came in against invoices are receipt vouchers; their cashbook lines are what bank reconciliation will match tomorrow.

Situations that come up

“The customer wants credit terms.” Terms live on the customer record, and the sales order picks them up. There is no document-level approval on a sales order — the only approval the applet has is a line-level one for selling below the minimum price. If your business wants sign-off on the order itself, that happens off-system and gets noted in Remarks.

“BigLedger will not let me finalise this order.” If the message is ENTITY_BLACKLISTED, the customer has been flagged by the Blacklist Overdue Customer job. That job does one thing today: it flags every customer whose outstanding balance is over their default credit limit. It is meant to flag overdue accounts too, but that half of it does not work in the current build, so an account that is merely late is never blocked by it. It is not recalculated as you type; it runs when your tenant’s job schedule (or an administrator, on demand) runs it, and nothing in the product fixes that to “overnight”. The flag is cleared on the customer’s Main tab, not on the order — and every run of the job clears all the flags first and re-evaluates, so a flag you set by hand lapses at the next run. The block covers sales orders, sales invoices, cash bills and outbound delivery orders, and nothing else.

“The item is out of stock.” Check whether the shortfall is real or is open orders eating into availability. Stock Availability inside the line shows both. If it is real: partial delivery, a substitute, or a date.

“The customer wants to cancel.” A draft order is discarded. A finalised order is voided, with a reason — which releases its document links and reservations, and removes its lines from the Pick Pack Queue unless the warehouse has already sent the picking list for packing. If an invoice has already been raised, that is a return or a credit note, not a cancellation.

“The customer changed the order.” While it is a draft, edit it. Once it is FINAL, either pull it back to draft (if your company enables that button and you hold the permission) or void it and raise a new one.

“The payment does not match the invoice.” Record what actually arrived as the settlement amount and put bank charges on the Expenses tab. Applying less than the full amount is a partial payment, and the rest stays outstanding — that is normal and needs no special handling.

What success looks like

At the end of the day, three checks, two minutes:

1. The Pick Pack Queue is empty of today’s orders — everything scheduled went out, or you know why it did not. And every order finalised today that needs delivering has been sent to the queue.
2. The Z Report for the branch balances against the cash and card settlements actually taken.
3. No invoice raised today is still showing its full amount outstanding for a customer who paid — if one is, a receipt voucher was finalised without a contra.

Common mistakes

Related documentation