Sales cycle workflow

I started evaluating the software for my small chemicals trading company and i have come across some things which aren’t clear to me.

  • adding an inventory is fine but the qty is always stuck to 0. there is no option to add the qty.

  • I don’t know if i am missing something but it appears as if there is no connection between inventory, purchase and sales (my three main modules for my business). e.g after creating a purchase how can i generate a sales invoice against this purchase? how both can be linked as multiple sales can be done against the same purchase.

  • my sale cycle (like any other) starts with a sale order (also can be called proforma invoice or order confirmation) , once the sale is confirmed it turns into a sales invoice and then eventually a delivery note… is this possible in Manager?

Thanks a ton in advance!

  • Have a look at Manager Cloud which contains some instructions how to categorize transactions that are affecting inventory
  • If you are asking how to make invoices to affect quantity under Inventory items tab, then check the link above.
  • Is this similar to sales quotes? If so, just enable Sales quotes which you can issue to customers. Sales quotes can be converted to sales invoices.

lubos, thanks for clearing up on the inventory portion.

as for sales order query, there seems to be a misconception. A quote gives the (potential) customer a look at what the cost of your product might be for budgetary or approval reasons. A Sales Order is a “booked” order approved by the customer but unshipped as yet by you. When the order ships, it gets changed to an invoice.

Quotes can be converted into Sales Orders or directly into Invoices(shipped orders) but here sales quote can only be converted into sales invoice.

Manager doesn’t currently support sales orders. What would be the benefit for you of storing it in Manager?

Well, i have a chemical products company and for me its really useful to have a list of orders which have been booked but still unshipped/sent to customer. would be really useful if we can having “convert to sales order” just like “convert to sales invoice” in the sales quote.

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OK, I will add new Sales orders tab over the weekend.

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Thanks for this. I was just about to post about sales order.

thanks lubos! really looking forward to it :wink:

Sales orders tab has been added to the latest version (14.5.35). You can convert sales quotes to sales orders and then sales orders can be converted to sales invoices or delivery notes.

What I haven’t done is some kind of status field for sales orders to make it easier to see which sales orders are still pending and which are closed. I will add status field but this is part of different feature I’m working on which will add statuses across the board (it’s required for sales quotes, purchase orders too)

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thanks a lot Lubos! really appreciate it :slight_smile:

Just a question. We also use the proforma invoice to receive prepayment from our customers.
Because until now we were using exel to issue the proformas and invoices, and now i try to incorporate all under manager, our proformas, invoices and and credit notes were continuesly numbered.

it seems that this has confused our auditor… so now we need to clarify all last year transactions re-entering them.

so my question is this:
a. can we have the ability to rename the sales orders to proforma-invoice,
b. can the number of the proforma invoice to be running alongside the invoice numbering?

Sales orders are when customer sends you purchase order. From your point of view it is sales order.

I think pro-forma invoices are best to be recorded as Sales quotes. The only issue is that you probably want quotes to say Proforma Invoice or something like that right?

If there is some difference between quotes and proforma invoices, then I can add new tab for it but my impression is that those are the same documents. Thoughts?

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Basicaly yes, same document, but i think they have different weight. i mean, that our customers can use the Proforma invoice as evidence to the bank to make the prepayment. i dont know if they can present the quote to do prepayment.

also, when we issue a proforma, the customer pays a part of the amount (ie 5500t * 130$ * 0.9 )
Later when we issue the final invoice, it might look like this (5467.232t*130$ - Payment received = total to be paid) [ can you incorporate this feature?]

here how can we record this transaction? (sorry if we ask too much :slight_smile: )

Looking into it more, pro-forma invoices are considered as binding agreements while sales quotes are not. I will probably add new tab Pro-forma invoices simply because they are not the same as sales quotes. Usually the workflow goes like this:

  1. Seller issues sales quote
  2. Buyer accepts sales quote by issuing purchase order which is sales order from seller’s point of view
  3. Seller accepts purchase order by issuing pro-forma invoice
  4. Buyer pays the amount on pro-forma invoice
  5. Seller delivers goods or services
  6. Seller issues sales invoice which is purchase invoice from buyer’s point of view

Manager already supports this. When you receive money against invoice, the amount received and remaining balance will be shown on invoice.

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How can we bind reception of funds on account of a proforma invoice (sales order) with the final invoice and payment ( i hope not through Journal entries)

There might also be “point 0” (preceding point 1 of Lubos’) a “request for a sales quote” in case the customer approaches you first and asks for a sales quote.Putting aside this detail all other points synthesize a very good descriptive analysis of the workflow.

@lubos there is one shortcoming with sales orders which I expect a lot of people would use. Our company make part invoices against sales orders on a monthly basis. One way I could just about deal with this in Manager is to copy a sales order to a sales invoice, delete the lines I don’t want to invoice or adjust the quantities down and then raise the invoice. The problem is there is no easy way of seeing what balance you have left to invoice against the sales order or what lines you have invoiced or what quantity from each line has been invoiced. At the moment this is what is stopping me moving over to manager for our accounting. The product is fantastic otherwise and I could see me wanting to use the server or cloud version.

Any thoughts on implementing this?

@charlie, that’s my vision how I want to see it work. I’m starting to work on this next month so as soon as I have something to show, I will make it available in the program and we take it from there.

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Great stuff. That would really be the green light for me

Dear Lubos

any news regarding the proforma invoice expected arrival in your great software?