Sales orders
Last post we looked at a couple of the inventory features in the most basic level of QuickBooks Enterprise that were not available in QuickBooks Premier.
What about QuickBooks Premier over Pro? What advantages for the inventory-based business are gained by having Premier?
There are two mainly. Sales Orders and Assembly Items. Today, let’s look at sales orders.
Years ago, one of the major trouble spots in using QuickBooks for inventory management was the inability to track customer orders. If you experienced a situation where a portion of a customer’s order could not be shipped right away (and who hasn’t experienced that?), how did you track it?
There were only a couple of solutions. One, you could create the invoice as though you had sold the product and use a printed copy of that as the backorder record. Or, you could use some other system (paper and pencil?) outside of QuickBooks. Likewise with special orders.
The introduction of the sales order feature changed that.
It’s important to realize that a sales order is an informational form. It creates no accounting entry. You can create them, delete them, edit them, all without affecting your accounting numbers.
Again, this feature is only available in the Premier level of QuickBooks. You can see the preference settings in the screenshot above.
Once a sales order is created, you can invoice only part of it, leaving the remaining balance as a backorder for the customer.
Above is a completed sales order for a customer, Robert Allard. He owns a hardware store and is purchasing 50 brass hinges and 15 doorknobs. Let’s say we only have 30 brass hinges in stock and no doorknobs.
On the ribbon at the top of the sales order form is an icon to create an invoice. Choosing that option causes QuickBooks to open the following dialog box:
Do we want to create the invoice for all of the sales order or just part of it? In our case, we want to invoice only selected items.
The next screen in the QuickBooks sales order to invoice wizard allows us to select those items.
We change the number of brass hinges to invoice to 30 and Doorknobs to 0. The resulting invoice looks like this.
This clearly shows the customer that, while he ordered 50 brass hinges, only 30 have shipped. The remaining items are held as a backorder.
Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
7791 NW 46th St. Suite 109
Doral, FL 33166
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com
