I would like to request the addition of an option to copy a sales order to a new journal entry. Alternatively, if there are other suggestions for improving my workflow described below, I would be glad to hear them.
Our business sells inventory and performs service work, often doing both together. Typically we will create a sales order for each service job that comes in. We use this to track the progress of the job and to send to the customer when the job is finished. This helps us to see when inventory is reserved for a job, and to tally costs before finalising a job and invoicing. When the customer makes payment we copy the sales order to a sales invoice. This works well for nearly all scenarios, but there is one situation in which is doesn’t:
We occasionally sell gift cards. Our VAT law requires that we declare and pay the VAT on the income from the gift cards when we sell them, rather than when they are redeemed. To facilitate this, I have set up a non-inventory item for “Gift card”. When sold, this credits a “Gift card holding” liability account that I have created. I immediately do a journal entry to reallocate this amount to a special account for the specific gift card that is loaded.
We now have a sales order for a job that is complete. It has labour charges and inventory items on it. The customer would like to pay for this job from a gift card. Since the VAT has already been declared when the gift card was sold, we can’t issue a sales invoice (I have just called our accountant to confirm), and I need to do a journal entry to offset the inventory and labour against the gift card account. I can do this, but I will need to manually copy everything across from the sales order, the sales order will continue to show as uninvoiced, and the inventory items will continue to show as reserved. I could cancel the sales order, but this makes it a bit harder to check the service history for a given customer.