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This is an outline of the Advanced Workflow for taking and fulfilling customer orders. The entire process is tracked within a single entity in inFlow Inventory, the Sales Order, making it easy for you to keep track of the order status and what needs to be done.

1.     (Optional) Customer asks for a Sales Quotation

A customer might ask you to give them a price for a certain order before committing to actually placing that order. We call this a Sales Quotation or Quote. inFlow can help you issue printed Quotes and allow you to convert them into Sales Orders if the customer later decides to place the order. Usually the workflow will begin with the customer placing an order. If you choose to do a New Quote from the Sales Order menu, the workflow will start at step one.

Sales Quotations

2.     Customer Places an Order

When a Customer places an order, you can use inFlow to keep track of products, quantities, and prices for that order. Once you have entered the order into inFlow, you can print out a copy of the order for your records or to issue to the customer.

Sales Order Advanced Workflow – Order

3.     Products are Picked from storage for the order

In this step, products are picked out of storage locations for order fulfilment. inFlow can help suggest where to pick the products from. It should then be updated with the actual picked locations so that inventory counts can be updated accordingly.

Sales Order Advanced Workflow – Pick

4.     Products are Packed into containers

Once products have been picked out of storage, the next step is to pack the products into containers to get ready to ship to the customer. The containers may be boxes or pallets depending on your business. Some orders may require multiple containers. In this step, you tell inFlow what goes into which container and then print out Container Labels with the shipping address and contents of each container.

Sales Order Advanced Workflow – Pack

5.     Shipping out to the customer

Once products have been packed, they need to be shipped out to the customer. inFlow can help you keep track of when you shipped each box and the associated tracking numbers.

Sales Order Advanced Workflow – Ship

Steps 3-5 can be done multiple times. For example, you might process and ship part of the order while waiting for goods before shipping the rest of the order.

6.     Invoicing Customer and Receiving Payment

Once you have shipped out the order, an invoice should be sent to the customer. The invoice may be different than the original order placed, if perhaps you were short on stock and shipped slightly less than the customer originally ordered.

Once the invoice has been sent, you need to wait for the customer to pay you. You can use inFlow to track the payment status along with the invoice.

Sales Order Advanced Workflow – Invoice

7.     (Optional) Customer returns some products

If you allow customer returns, inFlow can help you track when customers return products to you and any credit or refund you give them.

Sales Order Advanced Workflow – Return

8.     (Optional) Returned products may be restocked

If the products that the customer returned are not damaged, then you can restock them back into your inventory storage to be resold later.

Sales Order Advanced Workflow – Restock

9.     Order Cancellation

The Cancel Order button will only be available when the order hasn’t been processed at all. If it has (e.g. it has been partly shipped out or some items have been picked, etc.) then instead the “Re-open Order” button will be shown. Clicking it wipes out all the inventory movements, payments, etc., leaving just the original order.

Workflow Flexibility

The workflow is designed to provide a common structure for your order handling but also to allow you the flexibility to do things in a different sequence when it makes sense to do so. For example, you can choose to invoice for an order before picking, if this is more convenient for your business.

Order Status

inFlow Inventory uses a detailed Order Status to quickly describe the status of an order. The following are the possible order statuses:

• Quote – when a Sales Quote has been created but not yet converted into an order.
• Open – when a Sales Order has been placed but no picking has taken place.
• In Progress – when order processing (picking, packing, and shipping) have begun for an order, but before the order has been marked Fully Shipped.
• Fully Shipped – when an order has been marked Fully Shipped but not yet invoiced.
• Invoiced – when an order has been marked Fully Shipped, has been invoiced, but has not yet been fully paid by the customer or had any items returned.
• Paid – when an order has been invoiced and fully paid by the customer.
• Cancelled – when an order has been marked Cancelled.