All sales orders will be referred to as “orders”, whether they are quotes, orders, returns etc.

Order statuses

Orders can go through various statuses, the statuses can be configured to match your own business workflow.

An example for a mail order company may be:
Quote -> Stock allocated -> Please Ship -> Packed -> Closed:Shipped

An example for a web design company may be:
Quote -> Quote approved -> In progress -> Closed

These stages are all optional, so for example if you were creating sales at a till point they would go straight from Quote to Closed:Other when the sale was completed. A number of order statuses have been set up as default, you can add extra order statuses or amend the names of the existing order statuses as you wish.

Posting to accounts

Note that an order can also be “posted to accounts” – this is the point at which an invoice is raised, and the accounting information is updated. Until an order has been posted to accounts, any of the parameters can be changed. Once an order has been posted to accounts, only the payment due date and the address details can be changed. If you are not using Pearl for accounting, then you will still need to post the order to accounts to raise an invoice.
To correct errors on an order that has been posted to accounts you will need to create further sales orders or credit notes. If credit card information is stored within an order (entered by a customer online using the Pearl credit card payment module) then this information will be deleted when you post the order to accounts.

Posting to accounts : batch processing

If you wish you may post multiple orders to accounts using the end of day reconcile screen. Before you do this, ensure that all the correct orders will be caught in the process. Visit the Setup->Order statuses screen and tick the statuses for which you would like to batch post orders.

Stock allocation

Stock is set to be “allocated” on a per item basis, within each order. This means that limited stock can be allocated to specific customers. There are two ways to allocate stock:

1. Open an order, and enter a number into the “alloc” column. Save the order. If you “allocate” a bundle, all subproducts within the bundle will be set as allocated.
2. After receiving stock from a Purchase Order you may wish to automatically allocate all free stock. Receive the Purchase Order first in the normal way, then go to Products->Allocate stock from the main menu. This page will search through all orders where stock has not been updated and there are stock lines not yet fully allocated. It will allow you to choose the order in which stock is assigned to orders- by order reference, tax date, delivery date or date created.

The Sales overview page will show which orders have had stock updated (black tick), which are fully allocated (green tick), which are part allocated (orange tick) and which are not allocated at all (red cross).

An order can be shipped, posted to accounts and modified regardless of the stock allocation. If required, you can set up the system to prevent orders that are not 100% allocated from being packed, shipped or closed.

You cannot allocate more stock than you have. Once “stock allocated” = “stock in warehouse”, then “stock on hand” = 0. You can override this rule in the company settings to allow allocation of stock on unreceived purchase orders.
For orders created by your website, you can set Pearl to automatically allocate all stock possible when the order is created, to prevent others from buying the same product if stock is limited. You may wish to do this for some payment methods and not others. For orders placed with unconfirmed credit card details [payment method = credit card via PDQ], for example, you may choose not to reserve stock while for Google Checkout orders where payment details have been confirmed, you do want to confirm stock. These settings are made in the Setup->Payment methods screen.

To update stock, which removes the allocated stock from the database, ensure the “update stock on posting to accounts” option is set to “yes” (Setup->Company defaults) and post the order to accounts.

Alternatively, to manually update stock, open an order and click “update stock”. This will reduce the quantity in your product database and remove all allocations for the order as these figures will already been taken into account. Stock can only be updated once for an order. Once stock is updated, the quantities have been reduced so there is no longer a need to allocate the stock.

Viewing sales

Click Sales->Any status from the main menu to view the list of recent sales. You can choose to show or hide a detailed list products for each sale at the Setup->Company defaults screen.

To search for sales, you can use the search filter at the top of the Sales page (click “show/hide orders filter”), or you can type into the Orders quick search box at the top of the screen. You can search by order ID, invoice number, customer name, or company.

Click the pencil “edit” icon to open any of the sales shown – only one administrator can have an order open for edit at any time. Other administrators can view the order but not make any changes. See later in this document for more information about the order screen.