A Sales Order is a document that represents an order placed by one of your customers, where they ask you to give them a certain set of products or services at a certain price. In inFlow Inventory, all of the work related to an order is saved alongside the order, including information on order processing, shipping information, invoice, and customer returns. This makes it easy to find all the order information in one place and see the order status at a glance.

To create a new Sales Order, from the Sales Homepage, click the Order button. Alternatively, you can click the New Order link from the Tasks Box.

Entering Header Information

The header of the Sales Order contains the common information about the order that is visible throughout the Sales Workflow.

The following fields are in the Sales Order header:

Customer – (Required) Here you should select the Customer that is placing this order. This will usually be the company name of your customer. How to select a customer.

Contact – The person at your customer's place of business whom you should contact regarding this order.

Phone – A phone number you can call at your customer's place of business.

Billing Address – The Address to which you should send the bill or invoice for this order.

Terms – Payment Terms for this order, i.e. an agreement between you and your customer about how the customer should pay you for this order. You can select from a list of existing Payment Terms, or add a new type by selecting <Add New… > from the dropdown list.

P.O. # – A Purchase Order number by which your customer may refer to this order.

Sales Rep – The Sales Representative associated with your company that was responsible for this order.

Order # – A unique number by which you can refer to your customer orders. This is also used as an invoice number. This will be automatically filled in the first time you save your order. You can edit this Order # directly, or set the pattern of how order numbers will be created under Company Settings.

Date – The date of the order, usually the date on which the order was placed. You may change this date.

Status – A short description of the status of this Sales Order. See possible statuses and what they mean.

Shipping Address – The customer's address to which the products for this order should be shipped. This may or may not be different from the billing address.

You may also add up to three custom fields into Sales Orders. These will show up underneath the Sales Rep field. More information.

Billing and Shipping Addresses

When you select the Customer, then the billing and shipping addresses will be automatically defaulted from the customer information. If you have set the Billing Address or Shipping Address in the customer information, then the appropriate Address fields will be defaulted to these addresses, otherwise they will be defaulted to the customer's Business Address.

To select another customer address, click the small arrow next to the address field, and select the name of the address to use.

To edit the address, move your mouse into the main address box and click the Edit link. A popup will appear allowing you to edit the various parts of the address. Changes to the address here will not be saved back to the main customer information, but be kept for this Sales Order only.

Entering the Main Order Contents

The main part of the customer order is visible under the Order tab. To view this, click on the Order tab button at the bottom of the Sales Order details screen.

A green light on the Order tab is shown when the order is not empty. Otherwise, a red light will be shown.

The main contents of the order, which products are ordered at what price, should be placed into the table in the Order tab. The table has the following columns:

Item – The item name or item code for the product or service being ordered.

Description – A text description of the product or service being ordered. This will be defaulted to the description from the product information, but can be changed here.

Quantity – The quantity of the item being ordered. This will be defaulted to one but can be changed to the actual quantity ordered by the customer.

Discount – A discount, as a percentage, given to the customer on the price of this item. This will be defaulted to the default discount given to this customer.

Tax – (This may be hidden, depending on your company settings.) The Product Tax Code for this item, determining if it is taxed in a special way, e.g. tax exempt. This is defaulted to the Product Tax Code in the product information for this product. More information on Product Tax Codes.

Sub-Total – The total cost of this item for the quantity given and after applying discounts, but before applying taxes or freight. This is calculated based on the Unit Price, Quantity, and Discount, and cannot be modified.

To add in a new line item, first select a product in the Item column. Then, you may choose to modify any of the other columns.

How to add or remove rows from a table.

The Sub-Total field at the bottom of the order table shows the total charged to the customer before taxes and freight.

Pricing and Taxes

The Pricing Scheme helps determine how the default prices will be set up for this order. For example, you might have different pricing schemes for Wholesale orders and for Retail orders.

You may set a company-wide default pricing scheme, and a default pricing scheme for each customer. The pricing scheme in the order will be defaulted to the customer's default pricing scheme if it is specified, or to the company-wide pricing scheme otherwise. When you have chosen a pricing scheme, then the default item prices will be set based on the prices defined in the Product information for that pricing scheme.

The Taxing Scheme primarily determines how the Order will be taxed, including the tax rate and which taxes are applicable.

More information on Pricing Schemes and tax handling.

Order Tab Footer

The Order Tab footer contains more information about the order and pricing.

Requested Ship Date – This is the date that the customer requests that you ship the order out on.

Pricing Scheme – The Pricing Scheme for this order (see Pricing and Taxes above).

Taxing Scheme – The Taxing Scheme for this order (see Pricing and Taxes above).

Remarks – Any extra remarks on this order. These remarks will be printed out when you print out the Sales Order.

Tax – You may see one or more Tax fields depending on the Taxing Scheme set for this order. This shows amount of tax charged for this order. You may change the amount of tax charged here, but if the order is later changed, the tax will be automatically recalculated.

Freight – The amount of freight or other surcharges applied to this order. Tax is applied to this field if the selected Taxing Scheme has Tax On Shipping set. Clicking the dropdown arrow next to this will show you the estimated total weight for this order. You might use this to help you calculate estimated shipping costs.

Total – The total amount that the customer should pay you for this order.

You may click the Cancel Order button to cancel the order and avoid further processing. More Information.

Splitting Orders

You might want to split up one order into parts to be processed separately. For example, if a customer orders 100 units of a product, but you only have 40 in stock, then you might want to ship out and invoice the 40 units in stock immediately and leave the remaining 60 units to be shipped out later.

To help with this, you can use the Split Order by Picked button in the Sales Order. This splits up the current order to match the quantities that you have picked out from inventory, and creates another related order with the remaining ordered items.

The two orders will have related order numbers with a number added on to the end, e.g. SO-000105-1 and SO-00105-2.

Printing or Exporting Sales Orders

You may choose to print out a Sales Order or export it to another format, like PDF, to be e-mailed out to a customer.