Sales order process

A successful order typically begins with a prospect customer, progresses through the quotation process, and then proceeds into the invoice and fulfillment process.

In this article, we'll cover the sales order process in Qblue Inventory (invoice and fulfillment process) and provide workflow examples of this process for different kinds of businesses.

The sales order process in Qblue Inventory can be broken down into three steps:

1. Order creation
2. Ship and invoice the order
3. (Optional) Add extra steps depending on your workflow

You can create sales orders in any of the following ways:

• Manually on the Sales orders page
• Bulk importing sales orders by importing a spreadsheet
• Bulk importing them by integration with your connected Shopify, TradeMe, or WooCommerce account

Once created, the order will appear on the sales orders page as unprocessed, meaning it has not yet been shipped or invoiced. 

Orders that have been fully shipped and invoiced are marked by the status Fulfilled. You can view fulfilled orders by selecting the All statuses filter on the sales orders page. By default, the page displays only active (unprocessed) orders.

Tip: easily check at a glance which orders have enough available stock to be fulfilled - a green checkmark under the Stock good column (last column) indicates the order can be fulfilled in full with current stock.

When the order is ready, ship the order out and generate an invoice. You can do this using any of the following ways:

• Manually: use the Ship out & invoice button on an individual order to process it.
  
• In bulk: use the Batch invoice function on the Sales orders page to ship and invoice multiple orders at once.
   

If there is not enough current stock available for an order, you can either wait until the required stock is available before shipping, or you can partially ship it with the remaining items placed on backorder (marked as Partfulfilled in Qblue). For more information about this, view our article on managing backorders.

If you're using a connected shipping provider and want to manually push delivery details, you can print or email documents before the order is invoiced (leave the order unprocessed on the Sales orders page).

These documents include:

• Quote
• Packing slip
• Proforma invoice
• Tax invoice or tax credit invoice

You can also log in to your shipping provider's online portal to prepare a shipment and print shipping labels. If your shipping provider account is connected to your Qblue account (via Integrations), a shortcut link will appear on the sales orders page that you can use to jump straight into their website portal.

Qblue Inventory integrates with Starshipit and GoSweetSpot.

These are common workflows, but it's important to note that this process is flexible and may look different for different companies.