Manage sales orders
When you want to record your agreement with a customer to sell certain products on certain delivery and payment terms, you typically use sales orders or sales invoices. A sales order is used for items and/or services. There are a couple of scenarios where you must use a sales order instead of a sales invoice:
If you need to process a partial shipment, because of insufficient stock.
If you process a drop shipment: sell items that your vendor delivers directly to your customer.
If you want to include warehouse processes like pickings.
You can manually create sales orders or, as previously demonstrated, they can be generated from sales quotes and blanket sales orders. When you manually create a sales order, it resembles how you create a quote or blanket sales order, except that the Make Order function isn't necessary.
This unit provides an overview of the relevant fields on the General, Shipping, and Lines FastTabs on the sales order. This unit also includes information about item tracking and warehousing.
The Sales Order is an important document in the sales process. It includes relevant fields organized on the following FastTabs.
General
Lines
Invoice Details
Shipment and Billing
Foreign Trade
Prepayment
The following section describes the most important fields on a sales order.
General FastTab
The values for some fields on the General FastTab, such as all the sell-to customer and address fields, are copied from the customer card.
You'll also find additional trade-related fields on this FastTab like several date fields:
Posting Date: Specifies the date when the posting of the sales document will be recorded and posted to G/L, customer, and item ledger entries.
Document Date: Specifies the date when the related document was created. This date is used to calculate the customer's payment due date and finance charges.
Due Date: Specifies when the related sales invoice must be paid.
Order Date, Requested Delivery Date, and Promised Delivery Date are shipping-related dates.
Status: Specifies whether the document is open, waiting to be approved, has been invoiced for prepayment, or has been released to the next stage of processing. You can again manually change Status to one of the following statuses from the action bar:
Released: It's used when you want to release the document to the next stage of processing. When a document is released, it will be included in all availability calculations from the expected receipt date of the items. You must reopen the document before you can make changes to it.
Open: You can reopen the document to change it after it has been approved. Approved documents have the Released status and must be opened before they can be changed. You can't reopen a sales order that has a linked warehouse document. You should first delete the warehouse document before you an reopen the sales order.
By selecting several lines from the sales order list, you can release or reopen multiple documents at once. When you run the Release or Reopen function by selecting Release on the action bar, you can confirm if you want to change the status.
Salesperson Code: Specifies the name of the salesperson who is assigned to the customer. This field will be filled in from the customer card, but if you didn't have this configuration set for a customer, you can choose a salesperson during the sales order creation.
Sync document and posting dates
On the sales header you can enter the document data and posting date of the sales order. Depending on your business processes, you might want to enter different dates or on the other hand keep both dates the same.
With the Link Doc. Date to Posting Date on the Sales & Receivables Setup page, you can specify if these two date fields should be the same.
> [](../media/sales-receivables-setup.svg#lightbox)
To set the Link Doc. Date to Posting Date field, follow these steps:
Select the Search for Page icon in the top-right corner of the page, enter "Sales & Receivables Setup" and choose the related link.
Expand the General FastTab.
By enabling the Link Doc. Date to Posting Date field, the document date is automatically updated based on the posting date that you enter on the sales header. However, it’s still possible to manually change the document date and post the sales document with different document and posting dates.
When you leave the Link Doc. Date to Posting Date field unselected, the document date isn't linked to the posting date.
Lines FastTab
Once you populated the header with basic information like the sell-to customer, address fields and date fields, you need to specify what to sell in the lines of your sales order.
You can start with specifying one of the options available for the sales order selecting an option in the Type field, where you can specify the type of entity that will be used for this sales line, such as Item, Resource, or G/L Account.
If you choose an Item, you can continue adding additional information like the item number, Location Code, Quantity, Unit of Measure Code, and Unit Price. You can find more fields here, but these are the most important fields.
Location Code: Indicates which of the company's locations will be used to ship the order line. Inventory warnings and item availability are both affected by this selection.
Quantity: The order line quantity. Also, the quantity used by the program to check for sufficient inventory to fulfill the sales order from the selected location. If there is insufficient inventory, the program gives a stockout warning.
Unit of Measure Code: The unit of measure defined for the Quantity field (pieces, boxes, and so on). Business Central automatically populates the Unit of Measure Code field based on the Sales Unit of Measure field on the item card.
You can consult information about totals in the calculated fields below the Lines FastTab. In this section, you can also add the Invoice Discount as an amount or a percentage.
If the sales order contains many lines, you can use the Focus mode feature to collapse the FactBox and General FastTab and to have full focus on the lines.
It's easy to select multiple items at once from the items list to add to the Sales Order. You just need to choose the Select Items line action (this feature is available on all sales and purchase documents), select items from the list and click the OK button.
Invoice Details, Shipping and Billing, Foreign Trade and Prepayment FastTabs
On the three other FastTabs, you can find related information about the creation of the invoice, shipping and prepayment. Some of these fields will be filled automatically, but some of them need to be filled manually if you need it, or you can change its values.
The most important fields are described in the following list:
The Invoice Details FastTab:
Currency Code: Specifies the currency of amounts on the sales document and its value will be inherit from the Customer Card.
Payment Terms Code: Specifies a formula that calculates the payment due date, payment discount date, and payment discount amount.
Payment Discount %: Specifies the payment discount percentage granted if the customer pays on or before the date entered in the Pmt. Discount Date field.
Pmt. Discount Date: Specifies the date on which the amount in the entry must be paid for a payment discount to be granted.
The Shipping and Billing FastTab:
Ship-to: Specifies the address that the products on the sales document are shipped to. You can use one of the following options:
Default (Sell-to Address): The same as the customer's sell-to address.
Alternate Ship-to Address: One of the customer's alternate ship-to addresses.
Custom Address: Any ship-to address that you specify in the fields below.
Bill-to: Specifies the customer that the sales invoice will be sent to. You can use one of the following options:
Default (Customer): The same as the customer on the sales order.
Another Customer: Any customer that you specify in the fields below.
The Foreign Trade FastTab:
Transaction Specification and Transaction Type: Specify a specification and type of the document's transaction, for the purpose of reporting to Intrastat.
Transport Method: Specifies the transport method, for the purpose of reporting to Intrastat.
Exit Point: Specifies the point of exit through which you ship the items out of your country/region, for reporting to Intrastat.
The Prepayment FastTab:
Prepayment %: Specifies the prepayment percentage to use to calculate the prepayment for sales.
Compress Prepayment: Specifies that prepayments on the sales order are combined if they have the same general ledger account for prepayments or the same dimensions.