It will be a great option if you can add move option to ‘‘Sales Order’’ to ‘‘Sales Invoice’’ and ‘‘Purchase Invoice’’ since I am deleting manually when my orders is finished. So that when i open Sales Orders, I am only seeing the current orders which is not finished yet.
Or maybe there can be ‘‘Completed Sales Orders’’ tab, that would be super indeed.
Thanks,
Berke
I understand what you’re talking about. There is a ‘Copy to’ but then the Sales Order still exists:
You can do something like this yourself using Custom Fields, and that’s the approach that I would take in your situation.
Go to Settings > Custom Fields, and create a new one for Sales Order.
You can do something like this:
This status will then show up alongside each of your Sales Orders. You can re-order the list by clicking on the ‘Status’ column … and you can type the name of a ‘Status’ into search to show only those records.
This is very poor accounting practice. Once entered, no transaction form should ever be deleted except to correct an error. Imagine a government tax auditor asking you about your accounting processes. Your statement that you routinely delete sales orders (even though they have no direct financial impact) will invite questions about what else you routinely delete.
Also, as additional features are added related to sales orders, such as inventory commitment on orders, deletion may interfere with other Manager functions and may not be allowed. So you would be building future problems into your workflow. That is, you may have to change your workflow because of future improvements to the program. It will be better to change now.
well thanks for the informational answer but I am using Manager only for myself.
I have an accountant who is doing the professional accounting services externally and who is dealing with goverment business.
I guess, only there can be completed Sales Orders, so that I would only see the current Sales Orders when I click to this tab which will easen the job for me and for most of the people who is using the Manager I guess.
Then the custom field option described by @ShaneAU is the way to go. You can sort tab listings by clicking on the column headings to get open orders on top.
What you are really lookin for is this:
Basically I think that Manager should have the sales quotes, purchase orders and sales orders in the same format as Sales and Purchase Invoices. Red at top for open, green below for completed which is how sales invoices and purchase invoices work.
I understand exactly what you want - you want to easily see open orders. Don’t delete them, as Tut says this is very bad accounting practice. What you want is to “close” open orders.
My understanding was that Sales Orders don’t create any debits/credits and so don’t affect your accounting. I regularly create Sales Orders to save time and so that I can see what a future invoice will look like and then Copy to Invoice when I am ready to send out to customers. I then delete the Sales Order.
What exactly is wrong with deleting Sales Orders?
As per Tut’s response, it’s more to do with if you are audited in the future.
The government representative will likely want to know how you go about your day-to-day business, and hearing that you are deleting records (even if they have no direct financial impact) could be a very large red flag to them.
But I wont tell them I am deleting records - and as far I am aware there is no audit trail in Manager. The Sales Orders dont go anywhere - for example I do not send them out. They are simply used internally to assist me with future cashflow. Who is to know?
In my opinion, since Sales Orders are not affecting any values in the company it is not so important. I am only using them to check my current orders.
As I understand, you need to have a Sales Order for every Sales Invoice or a Purchase Invoice?
No, you can have the Sales Order tab completely disabled and never use it if you wish. If it’s not part of your process, you can hide it from view.
Then this is completely up to you. I was simply reiterating what Tut had mentioned - he gave a recommendation, and his reasoning.
But then @clive asked “What exactly is wrong…?”, so I tried to re-explain it using different words.
To be clear - there are many records in Manager that should never be deleted, because they will impact your accounting data. Bank Accounts, Customers, Billable Time, etc. This is why most of those items have an ‘Inactive’ toggle built-in, because even when they are no longer used (or the billable time has been invoiced), they still need to exist in Manager. The software needs them to exist, for historical reporting purposes.
Other items (like Sales Orders) are OK to delete from a technical point of view. It’s just heavily discouraged.
At least, that’s my understanding.
Here’s another reason to keep them…
Wouldn’t it be better to have a history of all your Sales Orders so you can refer to it later if you want to? The ones that did end up as a Sales Invoice / Purchase Invoice, and the ones that did not? You could have a few statuses:
Then you can easily see how many orders end up going through, and how many end up cancelled. If you find that you have lots of cancelled orders, it would be an interesting statistic to know, and something you can work on (you might then go away and try to figure out -why- so many are cancelled).
If you spent the time to create it, why delete it, especially when it’s easy to filter out the ones that are completed? You might not have a use for them now, but you might find them useful to look at later on. 
Sales Orders as advised by some “time and time again” are not financial records therefore its “entirely up to the user” if they need to keep them for future reference or delete them as they have no longer have any future relevance.
In my “far” to long experience, officialdom doesn’t give an iota about documents of internal intent (e.g. sales orders) which may or may not become related to future actual transactions as they have no basis in law - as they are only internal record for internal purposes.
I agree with you but I will be using @ShaneAU advice, as adding custom field to Sales Orders. Open, In Process and Completed. This will just work fine for me. Since I will be able to see the In Process Sales Order easily with this way. Thanks for all the help and answers though.
Just to clarify, your suggestion of draft, completed and rejected are not applicable to sales orders - but rather for sales quotes. By the time you have reached the sales orders stage, the client has actually accepted your quote and you are processing their order for them. Technically speaking that is. I have no doubt in many businesses that sales orders still get cancelled at last minute, but generally the concept of a sales order implies acceptance of the quote.
This is what I currently do, but I don’t like this approach for three reasons.
One, I can’t filter for client and open for example
Two, open quotes/orders are not at the top like they are in sales and purchase invoices
Three, when copying a quote/sales order to invoice, I have to then go back to original order/quote and mark it as closed. I would like to do that in the same step as copying the order.
These three reasons are why I am pushing for an overahaul of the filter view of open/closed quotes and orders.
I think you mean “suggestion”, usage of custom field.
Yep, that will just work fine for me.
Hello all,
I would like to add to this thread, if I may?
I have worked on many Accounting systems (as part of my job) and I would say usually there is a link between Sales Order and Sales Invoicing. You raise a Sales order for say a value of 1000 units of currency and then as you satisfy the sales order by showing how progress is made against that order, so for example. You cannot immediately satisfy the whole order so you invoice 400 units of currency.
You now have a Sales order of Total Value 1000 units, of which 400 units is invoiced leaving 600 units outstanding. When you finally invoice the remaining 600 units, the order is marked as complete.
The order would then show total order value 1000 units, Invoiced value 1000 units. The invoiced value should then allow the drill down to the invoices that make up the 1000 units (400+600)
A filter/Sorting option can then be applied to the Sales Order screen, to only show “Outstanding Sales Orders” or push them to the bottom of the list.
The user should still have the option to raise sales invoices without an order, that should be their choice.
What do other people think of this on this thread?
The only part of what you describe, @theeley, that isn’t present in Manager already is the tracking of partial-to-full fulfillment of a sales order through invoicing. You can copy a sales order for 1000 units to a sales invoice, then edit the sales invoice to show only 400 units. But the sales order just doesn’t show fulfillment status.
I think this would be related to another often-requested feature, which is the obligation of inventory items on a sales order so they are not, in effect, sold out from under you just because they haven’t been invoiced yet.
This opens a whole new area of development @Tut if you continue down this route. The concept I was talking about also adds further control to your workflow so that you should not over invoice (unless you allow the control to be ignored) your sales order. On the subject of “obligation of inventory”, this is another area in which I have worked extensively, although it does not affect how I would want to use Manager.io (An excellent product I must add!). With what I would call Stock Allocation, different companies will operate in different ways, as always. Options of First come first served, or consideration of priority customer or orders, the ability to allocate more stock than you physically have (because you have manufacturing capability to satisfy demand , or to be able to allocate against incoming purchase items and so on…
I have not used your stock module, so I really do not know what it is capable of.
Good luck.
