I don’t normally comment on interaction between users as I see it as pointless and I prefer to stay on topic focusing on the accounting or Manager question at hand.
I must however say that I am in full agreement with Gerardo on this. To anyone that runs a business, it is actually quite clear what he is trying to achieve. Too often in forum discussions there is too much focus on pedants - did he mean purchase order or sales order - instead of focusing on the broader picture of what the OP is actually trying to achieve.
What the OP is really trying to achieve is a process similar to as follows:
- Customer A wants to order 10 hammers, 3 saws and 5 pliers.
- You may quote Customer A for this or the Customer may place the order on your website.
- Customer A says yes - I am happy to proceed with this quote.
- Customer A sends you his Purchase Order (not necessary, but a desirable step).
- You copy Sales Quote to Sales Order and attach the client’s PO to that Sales Order.
- You copy Sales Order to Purchase Order and send your PO to your supplier.
- You convert your Purchase Order to a Purchase Invoice and pay your supplier.
- You receive the goods and copy from Purchase Invoice to Goods Receipts.
- You deliver to Customer A and copy from Sales Order to Sales Invoice and from Sales Invoice to Delivery Note.
- Customer A pays you.
- when you do your bank import, your payment to the Supplier is shown and your receipt of money from Customer A is shown.
The exact sequence and steps will naturally vary from business to business as for example I don’t use Goods Receipts.
Now the problem that the OP (and myself and no doubt many other businesses have) is explained below. The key thing to remember is that my example here we are focusing on one customer with 3 items. But let’s say the customer has ordered 100 items and you have five customers on one day ordering a similar quantity. And you have a sales team, not just one person managing the quotes and orders.
You have issued Sales Quotes to each customer. When they have approved the quote, you create a sales order. The point of the sales order is to indicate that this particular quote has been accepted by the customer and you are putting onto your system what the client wishes to order - Hence the term sales order.
This is where the first problem with Manager occurs - When you convert that Sales Quote to a Sales Order, the Sales Quote is not closed. I have worked around this by creating a custom drop down field to indicate Status of Quotes. But Manager really needs to have a built-in status for quotes in order for a large company to keep track of what quotes have been approved and moved onto the Ordering Stage.
I have requested this Status of quotes, Sales Orders and Purchase Orders Idea
Anyway. You have your Sales Order along with the customer’s Purchase Order attached. So you have in theory a confirmed record of what the client wants to order. You can copy Sales Order to Purchase Order in order to place an order with your own suppliers for the goods. The purpose of your purchase order is to send that onto your suppliers requesting an order for whatever goods you want to order. In this case I am assuming that the business does not hold stock, but rather orders on demand.
You send your Purchase Order to the Supplier and place an order. Your supplier sends you an invoice and you copy from Purchase Order to Purchase invoice and attach the Supplier Invoice.
This is where the second problem with Manager occurs. There is no way to link what goods the customer wants to order with what you end up ordering from the supplier as there is no link between sales orders and purchase orders or between purchase invoice and sales invoices.
What the OP is chiefly trying to ensure is that he orders all the stuff he needs from all his suppliers for every client that has placed an order. This is the crux of the question.
When you are dealing with one customer and one supplier it is easy to do this manually, but if you are dealing with a dozen clients all with large orders in one day, this becomes much harder.
This is where Quick books really excels. I recall when reviewing Quick Books, seeing the ability to link a sales order with a purchase order to make it easy to link up what you order from suppliers on behalf of a client. I suspect that this makes it easy to manage serial numbers as well. In effect you are allocating inventory purchased on behalf of a client at the ordering stage, not the invoicing stage. This makes sense in order to ensure that you have ordered everything the customers have ordered from you. Manager allocates inventory at the invoicing stage, but this is too late if you want to ensure that you have ordered everything you need for every client.
The fact that no money changes hands at this point in time is irrelevant. The OP is not trying to record a financial transaction here, but simply ensure that at this stage that they know which quotes are open, which quotes lost business and which quotes were successful and converted to an order. Then secondly the OP wants to ensure that all the goods ordered by various clients have been subsequently ordered from the suppliers and delivered to the aforementioned client.
Because there is no status of quotes, it is basically impossible to get any information via report on quotes - how many are open, what percentage of lost business there is and what quotes were successful. Businesses need this information to ensure that open quotes are dealt with (chased up) and to be able to pick up patterns as to why quotes were unsuccessful etc. I suspect that there is no actual link between quote and sales order.
Secondly because there is no link between sales order and purchase orders, it is impossible to ensure that every sales order has all the goods ordered from the supplier. Easy with one client with a couple of items, very difficult with dozens of orders with hundreds of items. Also a big difference if one person is managing the books in Manager as opposed to a whole team managing sales and orders.
With both Sales and Purchase Orders, again because there is no status there is no ability to close a purchase order and sales order once converted to their respective invoices. While I could create a custom status field, this is not desirable as orders are shown in date chronological order instead of open orders at the top and closed orders underneath - pretty much how sales and purchase invoices are shown with red (overdue) at top, orange (current to be paid) below and green below that in order of date. How are businesses (especially large ones) supposed to use the Orders tab if there is no ability to close orders and a traffic light system (similar to invoices) to easily see what orders are open etc.
Some might argue that this is more in the realms of a CRM. I disagree. A sales funnel is an essential requirement of an accounting program nowadays. We are not talking about charts and reporting features. How businesses are supposed to keep track of open quotes and orders (when Manager has no status) is beyond me. A status is essential. Secondly how are businesses supposed to keep track of what has been ordered on behalf of a client if there is no link between Sales orders and Purchase orders or sales invoices and purchase invoices or some way to link goods ordered for Clients A, B, C etc.
Manager is not just an accounting program - otherwise we would not have inventory, delivery notes, good receipts as none of these have anything to do with money changing hands. Manager also helps to manage the ordering and sales process by allocating inventory to a client (at invoice stage), which makes it easy to manage delivery notes etc. The entire inventory items and non-inventory items section has nothing to do with accounting or finances. They are just aids to manage the purchasing and sales process easier. So the frequent argument that feature abc cannot be implemented because Manager is an accounting program has never held water for me. Obviously certain things are CRM features - like allowing clients to view all their orders - this is best linked with your website etc. But managing a purchasing and sales funnel is pretty much mandatory to running a business and should be supported within Manager.
Quickbooks does seem to have this kind of functionality built in. The OP was only asking about creating a custom report to compensate for the deficiencies of Manager with regards to quotes and orders not being able to do what it is supposed to do.
All that the OP and myself and many others are asking for is for Manager to help with the quoting and ordering stage of the process in a similar way that Manager handles the invoicing and delivery stage of the process.