I have searched the forum and from what I understand “Sales Orders” is so far a partial (or preliminary) implementation in Manager.
I started to review this to see if I could use “Sales orders” for my present situation. I’ll explain below.
One of my Businesses (in Manager) is a Consultancy Services company. A business contract is typically on a “Fixed price” basis with various “Milestone” deliverables, which also triggers an invoice and partial payment of the project.
I was exploring if I could use “Sales Orders” to register signed Contracts with Customers. (A signed contract basically constitutes a Purchase Order from the customer).
An example below;
As you can see, I have added a “Customs Field” to be able to track “status” of this “Contract/order”.
What I think would be nice features to have in future Manager releases are;
An “order Intake” report function, that would list “order Intake” over a selected time period.
A way to be able to set “status” for individual Line Items in a Sales order. Basically in a case like mine, the contract constitutes a firm Purchase order for the complete project, however each “project milestone” is invoiced (and paid) at different time.
It is already easy to trigger Sales invoices by using the “Copy to” (Sales Invoice) function, and then delete the line items that should not be included in a specific Invoice cycle. It would, however, be brilliant if such invoice would automatically change the status of appropriate Line items to “Invoiced”.
When Invoice is paid (Money received), the status could yet again automatically be set to “Paid”.
When selecting “Sales Orders” from Manager’s main menu, the list could then show the status of each Sales Order (e.g. “Open”, Partially Paid", “Paid in Full”) and when “Viewing” a specific “partially paid” Sales order you could see which Line Items that are outstanding.
If something along the lines of 2-5 above would be feasible, the “order Intake” report (suggested in item 1) could be complemented with details about how much of each Sales Order/Contract that has been invoiced (and paid) and what the outstanding “Order Stock” would be.
These are just some thoughts for consideration and hopefully trigger a discussion to see if something like this would be feasible in the future…
If anyone has some ideas for another way by which maybe Manager already can do part of this I would be happy to get your input.
A sales order is an internal document that is never meant to be seen by the client. Basically you send a quote, client accepts quote, so you create a sales order that would detail exactly what you are providing for the client as they may not always accept every item on the quote.
When viewing Sales quotes and sales orders in future, it will have some kind of status such as open, closed etc. You will not have Sales Orders with paid status - as only invoices are paid, not sales orders. However the developer who develops this program may have some ideas along the lines of project milestones etc. But I think that you will need to create several sales orders to reflect each milestone. Thats the way I would do it.
The point of the sales order is to put onto your system what work/products you need to supply to the client. The end client never sees the sales order and you cannot assign a paid etc status to a sales order - only invoices. Think of a sales order as a memo or note to yourself that the client wants to buy xyz. That is really the purpose of the sales order.
As I said, what I would do is create a sales for each milestone. Hope this helps.
Sure, I fully realise that Sales Order is an internal “document” typically used to record an incoming purchase order. (When the “Attachment” feature is implemented in Manager, I assume “Sales Order” would have the ability to attach such incoming PO.) In my situation, a signed Consultancy Contract would in many cases replace the need for an incoming PO, which is why I tried to see if I could use the Sales Order function to keep track of “fulfillment” of such contract.
Yes, I realise that I could enter multiple Sales orders, one for each Milestone, but that would to some extent defeat the purpose of having an easy overview of a specific “engagement” with a Customer.
Of course you are right. A sales order is not “paid”, only a Sales Invoice can be “paid”. I think that is quite clear in step 3-4 of my original post. And I realise it may indeed be too complex to cover the whole “Sales Cycle Work Flow” as I indicated in item 5 above. I believe it would still be a great solution if it would indicate if a sales order was partly or completely “Invoiced”/“Delivered”/“Fulfilled” (whatever terminology is better) after which you have to review the Sales Invoices to check if there are any outstanding payments. Perfectly fine…
Basically, the essence of what I’m looking for is a way of being able to track “Order Intake” and fulfillment of such incoming Sales Orders. To be able to view the present “Order Stock” and what Sales Orders and/or Sales Order items (in my case e.g. project milestones) it consists of. (In other cases it may be physical products that still need to be delivered as they may have been “out of stock” or whatever…)
Finally, I do understand this is not supported presently but I wanted to initiate a discussion just to check if there are other users with similar requirements. If so, we could possibly add it to our “wish list” for future developments…
This is something that the developer will have to get back to you as he probably has some plans because your request is very similar to a lot of people who want some kind of project work management for clients. However, it will be some time before this comes onboard as there are quite a few things on the roadmap that need to be completed first.
