The Sales order in Service Suite is a large module which is used for creating and administering you sales orders.

The Sales order module in Service Suite is very easy to use, and can be used for a variety of purposes. The module can be used as an integrated part of the planning module in Service Suite, in order to facilitate easy creation of sales orders, based the actual appointments with your customers. Alternatively this integration also allows you to create appointments based on your sales orders.

Besides this, the sales order module can also be used as a Point of Sales (POS) module, as products naturally can be easily appended to a sales order using barcode readers and scanners.

Some travelling salesmen have found another alternative use for the sales order module. If you e.g. install Service Suite on a labtop, you can synchronize your local ERP system with Service Suite, thus having an updated copy of needed data such as your customers, inventory, prices and discount agreements with you in the field. When the salesman vists a customer, orders can be created on the spot, and later transferred be to your ERP system. Mobile solutions where you can enter orders in Service Suite, directly from your mobile phone are also available as part of the planning module.

If your company sells products or services to public Danish institutions or authoraties, you will likely be met with the demand of being able to send your invoices electronically to those Danish customers by the 1st february 2005.

Service Suite are naturally capable of sending your e-invoices to public institutions in Denmark in the OIOXML format defined by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

On this page you can get a feeling for the various areas of the sales order module. If you are more interested in learning about how you can use Service Suite to send electronic invoices to Public Danish Institutions you can find an article about this, in the Tips & Tricks section further below on this page.

 Sales orders.

When the menu: "Sales orders" is selected in Service Suite, the following screen will appear:

As the above illustration shows the screen is divided into a number of sections, namely: The icon-bar, the search area, a list of the orders, as well as a details section displaying relevant informations about the currently selected order.

 Order specific functions.

The icon-bar contains a few functions as follows; "Create new order", "Edit order", "Print", "Send electronic invoice", "Export order", "Delete order" and "Archive order". Should you be using an ERP-system which Service Suite is capable of integrating natively with, as e.g Sage Line 50 the icon-bar can also contain functions to transfer selected orders directly to your ERP-system. A list of which other applications Service Suite contains nativly integration to, can be be found at the page Integration to other programs.

 Search area.

Below the icon-bar a search area for searching in your orders are available. You can amongst other things search for specific order- or requisition-numbers, or perhaps use it to get a list of orders created to a specific customer e.g. within the last 3 months. Whether simple or advanced search features should be displayed can be toggled with the "Advanced/Simple search" function in the icon-bar.

 The list of orders.

By default this list contains all of your offers, orders and invoices which has been created in Service Suite. If you have used the search area, this list will naturally only contain the orders which matches the criteria of your search. This list could look like this:

As show above the list contains informations about when the order was created, the order number, the type of order (offer, order or invoice) as well as the customer number the order was created on.

Besides these informations you can see the orders total, the delivery date and perhaps even an appointment number if the order has been created from an appointment in the planning module in Service Suite. It is also possible to see whether the order has been exported, or transferred, to your ERP-system and whether the order has been sent electronically, in those cases where you need to be able to send your invoices to Public Danish Institutions.

If an order is selected you can naturally use the right-click menu, which gives the fastets access to the most frequently used functions for orders of that particular type.

 Order details.

The last section is the details section. This section displays informations about the currently selected order. It could look like this:

On this page we have chosen not to elaborate further on these details, in favor of describing how an order could be created or edited.

 The order header

The dialog in which the creation an administration of sales orders takes place could look like this:

As the above illustration shows the tab: "Order header" will be selected by default.

Here it is possible to enter the usually required fields, such as the type of order, the customer- and requisition-number, payment- and delivery-terms, as well as invoice- and delivery-addresses.

Besides this you can also enter an order discount as well as a base- and freight-fee. The discount and fees are calculated automatically depending on the settings of the selected customer, regarding the prices and discounts. The freight fee naturally depends on the weight of the products, but all values can be manually overruled should this be desired.

 The order lines

When we wish to add products to our order, we select the tab: "Order lines", which could look like this:

Here you can append products to your order en several different ways.

If you know your products fairly well you can use the quick search area to fast and easily find the desired products and append those to the order. As shown in the quick search area, you can immidiately change the price of the product as well as the reference, description and discount on the order line. An even more efficient way of appending products to your order is to use a bar code reader in combination with the quick search area, which will make the creation of orders extremely quick and easy.

If you cannot remember your product numbers, or do not use bar codes, then you can click the button: "Add products", which will enable you to search in your inventory for the products to be appended to the order.

If you use the planning module in Service Suite, and you have created categories which contains products, you can insert entire categories by clicking the button: "Add category". By selecting one or more categories all the products contained on the selected categories will be appended to your order.

From this screen you can also choose to recalculate your order, which will recalculate the entire order in accordance with the prices, discounts and other fees defined in Service Suite.

In the list of order lines you can also change the contents of almost all the available fields, as well as altering the position of each individual order line.

 Texts

When the tab: "Texts" is selected, the screen will look like this:

Here you can enter a header- and footer-text for this order.

If the order was created from an appointment in the planning module in Service Suite, it is also possible to view the original description of the customer appointment.

When the desired fields are filled in, or changed, we save the order by clicking the button: "OK".

 Tips & Tricks

The sales order module in Service Suite can be used in many ways and for a lot of different purposes. To make things a bit easier we have compiled a list of articles, which describes the most frequently uses of the sales order module.

• How do I send an electronic invoice to a Public Danish Institution?

The sales order module in Service Suite, provides you with a lot of functionallity. If you have any topics regarding the use of the sales order module that you would like to be described in details please let us know.

Should you have any questions regarding the use of the sales order module in Service Suite, you are always welcome to contact us at: servicesuite@mamut.com