How to Create An Order

This section provides a general overview for how to create an order for a simple product that requires fulfillment. For information on ordering other types of products (such as meetings or subscriptions), see Ordering Other Types of Products.

1. Open the Orders form.
   • See Anatomy of the Orders Form for information on the form and its layout.
   • The system automatically inserts today's date in the Order Date field. You can modify the Order Date as necessary, but it cannot be changed after an order has been saved.
   • The system automatically populates the Taken By field, on the Accounting tab, with your name when you open a new order. If your name does not appear in this field, you must manually enter your Employees record in the Taken By field before you can save an order.
   • If your name does not appear in the Taken By field automatically, contact your system administrator for assistance. Your user may not be linked to an Employees record.
   • If you open a new Orders form from a Persons record's Orders tab, the system automatically adds that person's information to the order.
   • if you open a new Orders form from a Companies record's Orders tab, the system automatically adds that company's information to the order. If the company has a Billing Contact, the system automatically adds that person's information to the order. If no Billing Contact is specified, then you can add a Ship to Person or leave it blank to create a company only order.
      
2. Enter the customer's information.
   • This includes the Ship To and Bill To person and/or company, the shipping address, shipping method, the billing address, and a marketing campaign, if applicable.
   • See Entering Customer and Order Information for details.
   • You may be able to skip some or all of this step if you opened the order from a Persons or Companies record's Orders tab and that person and/or company combination is the order's Ship To and Bill To parties.
      
3. Add one or more Order Lines to the product.
   • Each order line contains an order for one or more units of a product.
   • The system will prompt you if the organization does not have sufficient inventory to ship the number of units specified on an order line. In this case, you can save an order, but you cannot ship it.
   • The system calculates shipping charges and sales tax for a particular order line automatically, based upon the configured shipping and sales tax rates. See Managing Shipping Charges and Managing the Sales Tax Infrastructure for details.
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4. Enter payment or purchase order information for the order.
   • You cannot save an order without specifying payment information. If a customer has available credit, then you can specify a purchase order for future payment or a partial payment. If a customer does not have available credit, then the customer must pay for the order in full at the time the order is taken. (Having available credit is only applicable if Aptify is configured to perform credit checks — see Understanding Order Credit for details.)
   • See Specifying Order Line Details for details.
   • Note that you can save a quotation order without specifying payment information. See Entering a Quotation for information on quotations.
      
5. Add one or more invoice messages, as necessary. See Adding Invoice Messages for details.
6. Save the order.
   • Depending on your system's configuration and the products contained in the order, the system may notify you that the order can be saved with a Shipped status immediately. See Understanding the Initial Order Save Process and Shipping Orders and Placing Back Orders for more information.
   • For products that have inventory tracked in Aptify, the Order Entry system automatically updates the product's Quantity Reserved count.
      
7. Print reports or invoices as necessary.
   • Use the Print button on the Orders form or run the Report wizard from a view of Orders to generate a report or invoice based on the order(s). See Using the Report Wizard for information on running reports.
      
8. If one or more products require a physical shipment, the shipping department enters the shipment details on the order and changes the Order Status from Taken to Shipped.
   • If your system does not support auto-shipment, you may need to manually mark each order as shipped, even those that do not require fulfillment (that is, a physical shipment).
   • For products that track inventory, Aptify automatically deducts the number of shipped units from the product's inventory and increases the product's Quantity Shipped count.
   • See Shipping Orders and Placing Back Orders for more information on shipping orders and creating back orders for products that are not currently available for shipping.
   • When an order is saved as Shipped, the system automatically generates General Ledger entries for accounting purposes. See About Orders and GL Accounts for more information.
      
9. The accounting department periodically runs the General Ledger Batch wizard to batch shipped orders (in other words, to aggregate and transfer the General Ledger entries from orders to the organization's accounting system).
   • After an order has been batched, the financial information contained within the order can no longer be modified. The Batch ID, batch date, and batch time appear on the Orders record.
   • See Batching Orders, Payments, and Scheduled Transactions for more information on General Ledger batches