But sales orders can track amount invoiced and quantity delivered. We can do it if invoice or delivery note is linked to exactly one invoice.
For those who need to issue single invoice for multiple orders, why have multiple orders in the first place? Wouldn’t it be easier just to edit the first (yet to be invoiced) sales order and append new line items instead of creating new one?
As explained earlier
Suppose you do monthly billing and daily fulfilment, how would fulfilment team separate the fulfilled items/quantities on an SO that’s constantly changing?
You need separate SOs to control fulfilment.
No. Imagine you are Amazon and a client orders something. They receive a sales order or order acknowledgement from Amazon. The later on that day they order something else and get a second sales order from Amazon. If the customer wants to follow up on one of those orders (as they are two separate orders), they will use the information contained within order 1 or order 2.
So you can’t just delete those sales orders and create a brand new merged one to use for invoicing. Nor can you just modify the first one as the client will already have the original one sent out.
Another scenario. You work in a business to business environment or your clients are government bodies like schools. There is a process. They need a quote which you send them, then they need to create their purchase order on their system. We take that purchase order and my intention is to link their purchase order with my sales order. And so on. If the original sales orders are deleted, where do I allocate the customer’s purchase orders? Believe me, when dealing with schools, you need to have their purchase orders as they are so disorganised and things can take weeks to get processed. So I have to have their PO linked with my SO. So you cannot just delete individual sales orders or modify them.
A third scenario. The Sales Orders relate to different things such as IT Equipment and Network Cabling. You might want to keep track of the ordering and delivery of this separate yet still want one final invoice! So again you cannot merge sales orders into one.
Why can’t it be made possible to have multiple sales order numbers linked to one invoice? I am not really convinced of the need to have one delivery note as things are likely to be delivered by different companies on diffferent days. So the delivery note is not relevant and the customer won’t care about that. So all that is really required is to enable sales invoices to support more than one sales order reference number.
For independent sales orders, separate invoices should be sent back.
If you are running a monthly tab, an invoice in not really the correct document as it doesn’t have the correct work flow.
this is exactly the limitation we are all trying to overcome and the reason for this idea.
If you want to send your customer a bill for the month, send them a monthly customer statement.
If they pay the total Manager can already distribute the payment to outstanding invoices.
Makes more sense to me than trying to turn an invoice into a monthly statement.
Doing so well just confuse the different work flows different organisations use.
the topic on hand is to enable tracking the fulfilment status of sales orders without the need to create separate sales invoices for every sales order.
the present sales order status works on the below concept.
you order coffee every hour for an 8 hour work shift 22 days a month and you receive 176 invoices because there is no other way to track the order fulfilment status.
the proposed idea enables to give you a single invoice for the 176 orders with the ability to track its fulfilment.
which would you prefer?
A very simple underlying program logic with a one to one relationship between quote, order shipping and invoice.
Automated tracking through the above stages, readily achievable by the software and understood by all users because it is so simple.
Adding flexibility to customer “reporting” to support various more complex work flow or reporting requirements. For example to enable issuing a “customer statement” as a “summary invoice”.
The more complex work flow / reporting options may need to be enabled in the same manner other features are enabled in Manager.
But Amazon will issue separate invoice for each order.
The same as Amazon example. Customer will want separate invoice for each purchase order. They want to match at their end that what’s on purchase order will match with what’s on sales invoice.
I struggle to picture customer who makes multiple purchase orders, yet insists on singular sales invoice to be issued. Customer doesn’t want to match each purchase order to sales invoice to verify they are being invoiced for what they’ve ordered?
And if they do not want to match and want single invoice, then it just means they really do not see themselves as making multiple purchase orders, from their point of view, they just made one singular order and you should simply combine multiple sales orders into one.
To add ability to issue sales invoice for multiple sales orders, I’d need to add Sales Order column on sales invoice line items so it can be identified which line item is for which sales order. I really do not want to go down this route because it will overcomplicate everything for little gain. And “little gain” because I see no realistic scenarios where many-to-many relationship between sales orders and sales invoices is that useful.
All realistic scenarios show that customer doesn’t really care about orders they’ve made at all (they are likely made verbally) in which case you should simply update their existing sales order for additions or adjustments. Then issue invoice for that order.
That’s not a bad idea. In fact that could be part of the solution, especially after what you and @lubos explained. But I think summary invoices should have their own separate report.
So we will have theee types of customer statements:
Also, merging – if handled correctly – isn’t bad either. You keep old SOs marked as “merged” and make them inactivate. This way you still have the quotes “accepted” individual SOs delivered but you will lose the linkage to invoice since the new SO will have that.
Seems like a good trade-off for not wanting to issue separate invoices.
this is exactly the improvement i expected.
I will explain our use case in detail.
We have distributors as our customers and these distributors have their own sub-dealers. when a sub-dealer places an order of various items with the distributor, they issue us a purchase order. when another sub-dealer places an order for various items, a new purchase order is issued to us by the distributor. so the purchase orders are issued to us as and when our customer have their own orders.
We as a manufacturer have production schedules for every type of item. the production quantity is based on the consolidated total of the particular item across various sales orders which may include more than one distributor (customer).
now, the present tracking feature forces us to issue 15 seperate sales invoices, say the item was distributed among 7 sales orders of customer1, 5 sales orders of customer2 and 3 sales orders of customer3.
not to mention the work involved after issuing the sales invoices. for every sales invoice we have to generate an E-waybill with the authorities. soon there will be e-invoice introduced as well where we have to register every sales invoice with the authorities.
for the example above, with the present workflow we would be doing 45 tasks when it could just be 9 tasks.
we just have to mention all the sales orders on the single sales invoice. identifying, segregating and cross-checking if invoiced items are as per the purchase orders is the headache of the customer we need not worry about.
There should feature to add reference of sale order /purchase order on invoices via line items. Current I am using custom fields and putting the reference of orders manually but I hope it would be automated by the @lubos in future.
I think that there is some confusion with regards to some points, so I will just clarify this.
I am not the OP and I have not made any request to link multiple sales orders into one invoice. I have merely suggested that merging all sales orders into one brand new sales order may not be the best approach to solving the problem as it does not address issues where sales orders are emailed to customers (which may be followed up on in the future), customer purchase orders are linked to each individual sales order and where you wish track different aspects of the orders such as infrastructure cabling and IT equipment.
I understand that Amazon do not create one invoice for multiple sales orders. What I meant was Amazon is an example of a company that sends their customers sales orders for every shopping basket request made by the customer. So what are you suggesting Amazon do in the event that either they or the customer wants one invoice for the multiple sales orders? How would that be handled in light of the three points I have raised in first paragraph.
My chief concern can be summed up in one point. What is the purpose of the sales orders? Would the purpose of the sales orders be defeated by deleting individual sales orders and amalgamating into one sales order at a later date?
My answer would be yes as it would make it much harder to track different aspects of the order such as cabling infrastructure which can take several weeks and IT Equipment which can take a week. If it’s a big order there would be too much information to keep track of in one giant amalgamated sales order especially one that is constantly changing all the time.
In addition, (although I would need to check with my clients), I can see the value of creating one invoice for several small sales orders over a month instead of sending an invoice for every single sales order, but I would still need to have individual sales orders for linking my client’s purchase orders.
I think that @Patch may have the right suggestion of a statement or summary invoice that could incorporate multiple sales invoices? I think that this would be better as it would address the main request - one invoice for multiple sales orders and still maintain the existing delivery, invoicing etc tracking information.
So I would support a concept that would link multiple sales invoices into one summary invoice within Manager, whilst retaining the individual sales invoices.
sorry but i do not see the purpose of having a sales invoice consolidating other sales invoices.
which sales invoice would be reported to the authorities?
why would a customer want to see a consolidated invoice for individual invoices already received by them? we already have customer statements for that.
for users who are happy with the present system, it would still be possible to issue individual sales invoices for every individual sales order even if the suggested idea is implemented. having an option to select multiple sales orders on a sales invoice would not make selecting a single sales order on the sales invoice obsolete.
You are correct in that they would not be called invoices. They would be called statements that would contain the various different invoices reference numbers and item details and totals. What I meant was I would enable Manager to create customer statements within the sales invoices tab to include multiple sales invoices. But the sales invoices individual would be what is reported to the authorities etc. I just called it summary invoices but the correct term as you have pointed out is summary statements or customer statements.
Not if we are both talking about customer statements which we are both in agreement on.
to make things clear, I never agreed to merge sales orders. I only put forth and supported the idea to enable selection of multiple sales orders in sales invoices.
Nobody said you did. What you suggested was exactly what I suggested in my first post - to output the multiple sales orders to one sales invoice. But Lubos said that this can’t be done without messing up the whole delivery/invoicing tracking functionality.
Hence, which is why I am now in favour of the suggestion put forward by Patch as it achieves the outcome requested by the OP and ensures tracking of delivery/invoicing remains as simple and as effective as it currently is now.
You know the first time I used SOs I think I can do that but I discovered unforshantly I can’t
I think It’s a Neutral thing to be that way
I hope the developer will focus on that for a near update
Regarding this matter, we might want maybe to programme sales orders as shopping busckets or tabs where all oders are placed in before invoincing. This may be achieved by introducing ,within the busket or tab, sub reference order numbers and dates for easy identification of new orders to the buscket. Ofcourse the shoping busket or tab would have a universal reference for all orders which would linked to the invoice eventually. What is important is to make individual orders in the shopping busket or tab printable to make sure orders are signed for by the customer. At the end the busket can then be closed in order to generate the invoice. This invoice would then have both the sub reference numbers and the overal busket reference number printed on it. Forgive my grammer.
We encounter where the client has multiple quotes and we use order number separately.
However for Sales Invoice client wanted us to combine single invoice.
In this case invoice status become uninvoiced.
Whats best way if the order number can be shown as marked and we can able to relate each description line item can be tagged to respective order number to avoid uninvoiced status
