Set up Invoicing and Sales Orders

Before entering any invoices or sales order documents, you need to make sure that you set your settings and defaults. Many of these settings apply to both Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Invoicing, so only need to be set up once.

What's the difference?

Use Invoicing when you you're not using stock or don't need to track the despatch of your stock items. You can raise and print an invoice at any time. Your stock levels are only updated once the invoice is posted.

Use Sales Orders when you want to track stock items throughout the order process. Your customers raise orders with you, you allocate the stock items which reserves them for that order and prevents them being sold to someone else. When you physically send the items to the customer you record the despatch. Once despatched, you can raise an invoice for the customer. If you want to use traceable stock items, you can only add them to sales orders.

Decisions to make about Invoicing and SOP

Do you want to use a miscellaneous customer account for one-off cash sales?

If so, set this up in the Invoice and order settings.
Do you have customers who pay for their goods immediately?

If you do, then Set up payments with invoices and sales orders and choose the text to print on these invoices in the SOP Settings.
Do you want to use Opayo (formerly Sage Pay) to process these as card payments?

If so, set up your Opayo account.
Do you want to customise the printed invoice for your company, such as add your company logo?

If you do, then create invoice and credit note layouts. If not, just use the default layouts.
Do you want to control what users can see and change on sales orders such as the selling price or discounts?

If so, set this in the Invoice and order user permissions.
Sales orders only - Do you sell to customers in other countries?

Choose whether to change the exchange rate when creating invoices from sales orders and choose the text to print on these invoices in the Invoice and order settings.
Sales orders only - Do you want to allocate stock to orders as they're entered? Set this in the Invoice and Order Settings.
Sales orders only - Do you want to print despatch notes, picking lists and order acknowledgements? Set this in the Invoice and Order Settings.
Do you have regular costs that you add to your sale orders such as carriage or insurance?

To save you entering the details each time, you can set up records for Additional charges.
Do you want deliver to different locations for any of your customers other than their main address?

If so, then set up customer delivery addresses for those customers.
Do you use analysis codes for reporting?

You can choose which analysis codes you want associate with your sales orders and invoices.
Do you want to set up price lists and discounts for your stock items?

If so, then set these up the Price Book.