Partial Delivery: Invoice the First Drop

Invoice part of a sales order and give the customer paperwork

Steps 2 to 4 of a partial delivery: invoice the part of the order you can ship, give the customer paperwork for it, and keep an eye on what is still owed. It follows Step 1, where the order was kept whole for everything the customer asked for. The running example is GadgetSphere Distribution’s order for 40 ultraportable laptops, of which warehouse GSD-WH-01 holds 25 (Meet GadgetSphere). Check Before you start first: the Knock Off Configuration row, the stock and the credit decision. Invoice only what ships: invoicing all 40 and shipping 25 takes forty units out of stock and posts forty units of revenue, with fifteen still on your shelf (Common mistakes).

What each moment changes: the balance, the stock and the postings at each step.
Step 2: invoice the part you can ship.
Step 3: give the customer paperwork for this drop.
Step 4: watch the balance.

What each moment changes

Moment	Order line’s balance for invoices	On hand at `GSD-WH-01`	Available at `GSD-WH-01`	What posts
20 Oct, order FINAL (and its follow-on job)	40	25	−15	Nothing — an order is 0/0
27 Oct, invoice 1 for 25 saved	15	25	10	Nothing yet
27 Oct, invoice 1 FINAL	15	0	−15	Stock out, dated 27 Oct; the sale and the receivable; one e-invoice record
31 Oct, October closes	15	0	−15	Nothing for the 15 — no revenue, no accrual, no stock movement
6 Nov, goods receipt for 12 finalised	15	12	−3	The purchase side
6 Nov, invoice 2 for 12 FINAL	3	0	−3	Stock out, dated 6 Nov; the second sale, receivable and e-invoice
6 Nov, the last 3 closed	none	0	0	Nothing

Available is stock on hand at the location, minus the un-invoiced balance of open orders there, minus reservations, worked out live from the stored rows each time you look, and it is allowed to go below zero. Read the −3 after invoice 2 as a message: three laptops are promised and none is coming. Read the 10 between saving and finalising invoice 1 as a warning: for those minutes, Available overstates what you can promise by 25.

    flowchart TD
  SO["Sales Order · 40 laptops<br/>FINAL · posts nothing"]
  SO -->|"KO For · To Knockoff 25 · 27 Oct"| SI1["Sales Invoice 1<br/><b>25 out of stock</b><br/>RM 100,700"]
  SO -->|"KO For · To Knockoff 12 · 6 Nov"| SI2["Sales Invoice 2<br/><b>12 out of stock</b><br/>RM 48,336"]
  SO -.->|"SO Line with SI KO · Close"| CL["3 closed<br/>never billed"]

Step 2: Invoice the part you can ship

Finance > Sales Invoice (Internal) > Sales Invoice > Create > KO For > Sales Order

The outcome: 25 laptops billed, out of stock, and the order showing a balance of 15.

Create the invoice and pick the customer. Open KO For, search for the sales order, and look at the grid. The line shows Base Qty. 40 and Bal. Qty. 40, and To Knockoff starts at 40. Click into To Knockoff and change it to 25.

The To Knockoff field will not let you over-ship. It accepts any figure up to the balance quantity and silently refuses a larger number. If you find yourself unable to type the figure you want, check the balance — something has already been invoiced against that line, perhaps a draft. And ignore Knocked Off Qty once you have typed: it is Base Qty. minus the figure in To Knockoff, so it reads 15 the moment you enter 25.

Add the 25 serial numbers on the line’s Serial Number tab. Check the delivery address and the transaction date on Main Details, check the E-Invoice tab, then SAVE — the order’s balance is 15 from this moment — and FINAL the same day. A saved draft holds the order’s quantity and moves nothing, so a draft left overnight shows the next person a balance of 15 and a shelf of 25.

The posting, on 27 October:

Dr  Debtor — the customer's trade account    RM 100,700.00
    Cr  SALES-LAPTOP                                    RM 95,000.00
    Cr  LIAB-SST-OUTPUT                                 RM  5,700.00

25 laptops leave GSD-WH-01, dated 27 October. No cost-of-goods-sold journal is part of FINAL: a follow-on job writes the cost back onto the invoice line, and the cost-of-goods-sold journal is written by month-end processing in the Financial Report applet.

If FINAL succeeds but the Trace Document tab shows no journal a minute later, the posting job failed afterwards — usually a missing default GL code for the customer. FINAL is not blocked by that; find and repair it in Financial Report > Error Checking > Trace Document.

What else this one invoice set off. If GSD submits e-invoices, invoice 1 is its own e-invoice: a follow-on job of FINAL enters it, and the order — which is not an e-invoice document type — was never submitted. At RM 100,700 it is above the RM 10,000 line, so even an invoice marked Consolidated goes to the Individual Pool. If your company pays sales commission through a commission scheme, the commission job works on each finalised document, dated on that document’s date — so this salesperson’s October commission carries 25 laptops, not 40.

Step 3: Give the customer paperwork for this drop

Delivery Order (Internal) > Create > KO For > Sales Invoice

The outcome: something for the customer to sign for these 25 laptops, raised so that the order’s balance stays right.

The simplest paperwork is the invoice itself, travelling with the goods. If the customer wants a separate document to sign, raise a delivery order from the invoice: on a new delivery order, open the document’s KO For tab and its Sales Invoice section, and pick invoice 1. That section appears when your company enables a Sales Invoice → Delivery Order row in its Knock Off Configuration; the delivery order then takes from the invoice’s own balance and leaves the order’s balances alone. It moves no stock, posts nothing and is not an e-invoice document — the stock left on the invoice in Step 2.

Do not also knock this order line off on a goods delivery note. The delivery note’s KO For Sales Order Item tab reads its own row, which invoice 1 did not touch, so it offers the full 40. Take 25 there, and saving the note recalculates its balance from every knock-off on the line — the invoice’s 25 and its own 25 — which comes to less than nothing, so the row is deleted and the second drop’s delivery note will find no balance. Invoice 2 is then recalculated the same way and can delete the invoice balance too, taking the line out of KO For and off the order’s outstanding list before you have decided anything. One route per order line: invoices only, or a delivery note and no invoice knock-off.

If your branch runs drivers and vehicles, this is also the point to hand the drop to dispatch — and it does not happen by itself. Finalising the invoice puts nothing in the Pick Pack Queue. Open the invoice’s Delivery Details tab, switch Require Delivery on for the lines going out, check Qty To Deliver (it defaults to the line quantity — 25 here), and click Send To Queue. On a draft invoice the button stops with Sales invoice need to be finalised. That button writes the pick-pack queue rows from which dispatch creates a delivery job with Create Delivery Job — in the Delivery and Installation applet, or on the invoice applet’s own Pick Pack Queue screen. (Invoice lines cannot be sent on to the Warehouse Management picking queue; that button exists on the two Sales Order applets — internal and Shopee — and not on the invoice.) Send the drop from one document, the invoice or the delivery order, never both: each document gets its own queue rows, so dispatch would see the drop twice. And click it once: a second send after a page reload adds to the queued quantity rather than replacing it. From there the job goes onto a trip — see Delivery and Installation Scheduling.

Delivering first and invoicing later is a different route, not a variation of this one. If the goods should leave on a delivery order and be billed afterwards, the order is knocked off by delivery orders and each delivery order by an invoice — the worked example on the Delivery Order page follows 40 laptops that way. Choose that route or this one for each order, not both: the two keep separate balances, and an order sent down both ends up with one of them that never falls.

Step 4: Watch the balance

Sales > Sales Order (Internal) > SO Line with SI KO

The outcome: a single screen you can run every Monday, and at every month-end, that tells you what you still owe your customers.

SO Line with SI KO lists order lines against invoiced quantity, one row per line. After invoice 1 your order appears with Qty Ordered 40, Qty Received 25, Qty Outstanding 15, and the invoice number in the SI No’s column. (Yes, the column is labelled Qty Received — it means the quantity invoiced so far; the screen was built from the purchasing report of the same shape.) Queue Closed Status reads Open, and a red Close button sits at the end of the row for as long as there is a balance.

Where the figures come from matters when two of them disagree. Qty Received is recomputed from the invoice knock-offs each time you open the screen, and it counts a saved draft invoice as well as a final one. Qty Outstanding is the stored balance row. Qty Closed is what is left when both are taken from Qty Ordered. Filter by Qty Outstanding Filter YES and by branch or date range, and it becomes your open-commitments list — the orders where a customer is waiting for something.

This is a better list than the order listing itself, because an order with one unit outstanding looks exactly like an untouched order until you open it. It is also a better list than the order applet’s SO Detailed Report, whose Outstanding Qty column is fed the quantity each invoice took — 25 against invoice 1 here, not the 15 still owed — and which never sees a Close.

At month-end — the job, not the screen. On 31 October the books show RM 95,000 of laptop sales from this order and nothing for the 15 still owed: an order is a promise, not revenue, and nothing accrues for it. That is right, because nothing was delivered. The accountant’s cut-off check here is short — every drop that left in October has a FINAL invoice dated in October — and the sales administrator’s is the outstanding list: each open line either has a date the stock is expected, or a decision that it never will.

What success looks like for this part

Invoice 1 is FINAL for 25 laptops, any delivery order for this drop was raised from the invoice, and SO Line with SI KO shows the order with Qty Ordered 40, Qty Received 25 and Qty Outstanding 15. When the order is finished, run the whole order’s success check; its common mistakes cover every part.

Common mistakes in this part

The order’s common mistakes are kept together on the front page. For these steps, read first the ones about leaving an invoice in draft, knocking the same line off on both an invoice and a goods delivery note, finalising and waiting for dispatch to see it, invoicing all 40 and shipping 25, and reading the SO Detailed Report for what is still owed.

Next: Steps 5 and 6, ship the balance or close it.