What a sales order's status means

A sales order carries one status of its own, separate from draft and active: Open, Completed or Cancelled.

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Draft: create
  Draft --> Open: Release — number allocated
  Open --> Open: edit freely, invoice, fulfil
  Open --> Completed: Complete
  Open --> Cancelled: Cancel order
  Completed --> [*]
  Cancelled --> [*]

Release is the order’s confirmation. There is no separate confirm step.

Open

The default, and where an order spends its life.

An open order stays fully editable, including after it has been invoiced. Releasing it does not lock it; only reaching a terminal status does.

An open order can spawn invoices and fulfillment orders, as many times as the remaining quantities allow.

Completed and Cancelled

Complete marks an order finished. It is a judgement someone makes — nothing completes an order automatically from invoiced or picked quantities.

Cancel order ends an order that will not be fulfilled. It is available from Open only.

Both ask for confirmation, and neither can be reversed. Once an order leaves Open it never returns, and it locks: no edits, and all three actions disappear from the menu.

An order is never archived. It retires through its status instead.

Which actions appear

The server decides what applies to this order, right now, and the ⋮ menu lists exactly that. While the order is Open: Create Invoice, Create Fulfillment Order, Complete, Cancel order. After that: none of them.

What Create Invoice changes

Nothing. The order stays Open, and the action writes only to the invoice it spawns.

What the order does track is how much of each line released invoices bill for. The picker starts each line at ordered less already invoiced, and leaves out a line billed in full. An order with nothing left open refuses the action.

The spawned invoice is released in the same step, numbered and sealed. Save as draft leaves it a draft instead — no number, not in any list, reachable only because the order form opens it straight away — for the fields a person still adds.

It copies each line’s product, unit, price, discount and text with the quantity still open, and records which order line it was billed from, so the trail is readable from the invoice. What the customer agreed at the top of the order travels with it too: the Sold-To, Ship-To and Bill-To addresses, the payment terms and the payment method.

Tax is re-derived rather than copied — from the invoice’s own customer and the addresses it now carries. An invoice raised after the customer’s VAT registration changed reflects the new treatment, not the order’s, while the destination that decided the order’s tax still decides the invoice’s, because the Ship-To Address came with it.

The list

The Sales Orders list opens on Open, with Completed, Cancelled and All beside it. A tab’s filter combines with whatever else is filtered, so switching tabs never discards a filter — see Lists.

Raising orders is Create an order.