Setting up Sales Orders

Sales Orders bring together your customer information with the goods and services you supply. Goods and services are priced according to the selling prices and discounts set in your Price Book for your stock items.

Before entering sales orders, you need to consider setting up the following:

• Invoice and order settings
• Invoice and order user permissions
• Set defaults for a carriage and other charges
• Payment methods
• Invoice and credit note layouts
• Delivery addresses
• Analysis codes

Decisions to make about your sales orders

When you first configured Sage 200, you could choose:

• Whether your order prices are inclusive or exclusive of VAT.
• Whether to allow payments to be entered with sales orders.
• The starting numbers for your orders, invoices and other documents.

You can change your answers to those initial questions and answer other questions, such as:

1. 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.

2. Do you have customers who pay for their goods immediately?

   If you do, then set up Payment methods and choose the text to print on these invoices in the Sales order settings.

3. Do you want to use Opayo (formerly Sage Pay) to process these as card payments?

   If so, then set up your Opayo account.

4. 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.

5. 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.

   By default, these permissions are set for users with administrator access.

6. Do you sell to customers in other countries?

   If you do, then choose the text to print on these invoices in the Invoice and order settings.

7. 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 your Set defaults for a carriage and other charges.

8. Do you want deliver to different locations for any of your customers other than their main address?

   If so, then set up Delivery addresses for those customers.

9. Do you use analysis codes for reporting?

   You can choose which analysis codes you want associate with your sales orders.

Invoice and order settings

These settings apply to both the SOP and Invoicing modules. Here you specify:

• Document numbers.

  If you haven't already specified your document numbers in the configuration assistant, you can set the starting numbers here. These are the numbers used for invoices, credit notes, sales orders, quotations, pro formas, returns and despatch notes.

  Invoice numbers are used by both Invoicing and sales orders, so your invoice numbers are assigned to each one in order. For example, you create invoice for an order so this has invoice number 1, and you then save an invoice using the Invoicing module, this has an invoice number of 2, and so on.

  Once you've saved an invoice or order, the starting numbers can't be changed.

• Payment with invoice or order options.

  If you receive payment at the same time as creating the invoice, you can choose to record receipt of these payments with the invoice or order. This is useful to receive deposits. Selecting this option adds a Payment with Order tab to the order entry screen.

• When you enter a full sales order or quotation, you can add other items that the customer might be interested in buying.

  • Use Suggested items to see items that are specific to the customer. These include the customer's preferred items (you can think of these as 'favourites'), and items that the customer has recently ordered and frequently ordered.
  • Use Cross-selling items to see items that are often sold together with an item you've added to the order or quotation. For example, if you sell a printer, you might want to show print cartridges or cables for that printer.

• The cash and prospect account.

  The cash account is a generic account you can use to enter invoices and orders for customers who don't need a customer account.

  The prospect account is another generic account that you can use to send quotes to potential customers. You can record the details of the potential customer without having to create a customer account for them.

• VAT inclusive or exclusive pricing.

  You must choose whether the selling prices of your stock items are inclusive or exclusive of VAT.

  Note - warning

  You can change the settings you selected in the Configuration Assistant here, but once you save a sales order, pro forma or quotation or invoice, you cannot change whether your prices are inclusive or exclusive of VAT, so you should ensure you are happy with your choice before proceeding.

• Text to print on invoices.

  You can specify the following text to be printed on your invoices:

  • Text to indicate that the invoice has been paid. This defaults to Paid in Full, but you can change it if you want to.

  • Text that's included on invoices that you produce for Opayo (formerly Sage Pay), Sage Invoice Payments, and GoCardless.

    See Change the text displayed on invoices.

  • For invoices that contain EU zero rated sales, we supply a number of messages approved by HMRC that you that you can select from.

  • If you use domestic reverse charge VAT rates, we supply a number of HMRC approved messages you can choose from.

  Note: EU zero rated sales and domestic reverse charge options only apply if your company is registered for VAT in the UK, so if your company's country is not GB, you won't see these options on the screen.

• Intrastat options.

  If your company buys or sells goods in the EU, then you may need to report on this to HMRC, if the total value of this trade is more that the an amount specified by HMRC (UK), or the Revenue Commissioners (Ireland). This is called an Intrastat Declaration. If you're required to complete one of these, you can choose to include your sales orders in Intrastat entries.

  You also specify:

  • Whether to include terms of delivery on the Intrastat entry.

  • The nature of transaction codes on this screen (for example, sales or acquisitions, free of charge goods), although you can change these on individual entries.

  If your company is based in Ireland (your company country code is IE), there are extra options to choose the default mode of transport (MOT), and to include statistical values on the Intrastat Entry.

Open: Settings > Invoicing and Sales Orders > Invoice and Order Settings

See Invoice and sales order settings and defaults.

Invoice and order user permissions

You can set up Sage 200 so that you can control which users can see or edit certain parts of your invoices and orders. Users who have admin access have these permissions tuned on by default.

You don't have to set any of these permissions. If they're not set, the users can't see profit and discounts, override prices, etc. Any permissions you do set apply to both invoicing and sales orders.

You can choose to allow users to:

• See the amount of profit made for each invoice or orders and item line.

  This enables the Profit buttons when:

  • Enter and amending sales orders, pro formas and quotes.
  • Viewing invoices.

• View details of all discounts that have been used to make up the total for the order or invoice line.

  This could be a combination of a quantity discount, line discount and customer discount. This adds a Discounts button to the Edit item line screen.

• Override putting an order or invoice on hold when the customer's account is over their credit limit.
• Change the price or discount of stock item.
• Change the cost price of a stock item (only for items that use the FIFO costing method).

This cost price is only used to calculate the profitability of the order or invoice.

The cost price stored on the stock item is not affected. The stock history and reports use the cost price set on the stock item for their calculations.

• Create a purchase order from the sales orders (back-to-back orders).

  Allows the user to create a purchase order straight away for the relevant stock items on the sales order. This adds a Save and Generate PO button to the Details tab of the order.

• Set a default warehouse for a user.

  When this user enters an order or invoice, they can only choose stock items from this warehouse by default, although they can change this. This is useful if a user needs to select products from a specific warehouse or branch first.

Open: Settings > Invoicing and Sales Orders > User Permissions.

See Invoice and order user permissions.

Set defaults for a carriage and other charges

You can add charges to invoices and orders for such things such as carriage and insurance. If these are just a one-off cost, then you can just add them 'on the fly'. If you have charges that you use regularly, then set them up as an additional charge record, so that it's quicker to enter them and it'll make sure the charges are applied consistently.

These additional charge records are used for invoices and sales orders.

Open: Settings > Invoicing and Sales Orders > Additional Charges.

See Create charge defaults.

Payment methods

When a payment is entered with an invoice or order, a payment method must be selected which describes the type of payment, and the bank account the payment is to be paid into.

You must set these payment methods up first. For each payment method you specify:

• A name and description.

  Note: If you use Opayo, a payment method called Online card payment is set up automatically. You can't use this description for any other payment methods.

• The bank into which these payments will be posted. You can only choose base currency bank accounts as foreign currency payments are not allowed for immediate payments.

Invoice and credit note layouts

Invoices and credit notes are printed using a layout file. This specifies what information is shown on the invoice, where it's located on the page and how it's displayed, font size and colour etc. If need to, you can use multiple layout files, and you can customise them to suit your organisation.

We provide a number of default layouts that you can use 'out of the box'. You may want to use different layouts for different customers, or set up a layout for printed documents and another for sending documents by email.

If you're happy to use the default layout without any changes, you don't need to anything.

To use a different layout, you must:

• Create the layout you want to use. This is done using the Sage's report writing tool, Report Designer. We recommend that you make changes to one of the default layouts.
• Set the new layout as the default for all customers, or set the layout you want to use on each customer account.

See Use custom layouts

Delivery addresses

Your customers may have delivery addresses that are different to their invoice address. You can enter a delivery address as one-off when you create the order or invoice. If your customer always uses the same delivery address, you can create delivery address records and link them to the customer's account. You then choose the address to use on the order.

Delivery addresses are only printed on despatch notes.

Delivery addresses are used for both invoicing and sales orders so you only need to set them up once. There's no limit on the number of delivery addresses you can have for each customer.

Open: Customers > Create & Amend Accounts > Customer Delivery Addresses

See Create delivery addresses

Analysis codes

Analysis codes are custom fields that you can associate with invoices and sales orders. You can use them to filter or group invoices on reports and workspaces. For example, you could use analysis codes to specify which sales person has sold the goods, or to specify which branch or region placed the sales. For example, you could use analysis codes to specify school or department is responsible for the sale, or which class the a school uniform sale is for. You use the same analysis codes for invoicing and sales orders and you can have up to 20 analysis codes.

Each analysis code has two parts: a Code for the type of information and a set of Values that can choose for each invoice. For example, a Sales person analysis code could have a set of values; Ann, Tim and Chris. You choose a Value for each relevant analysis code. If an analysis code is not to be used, leave the value blank.

Analysis codes can be added to the:

• Whole order or an invoice - using the Analysis Codes tab.

• Individual items on an order - using the Analysis Codes button on the item.

Open: Settings > Organisational and Financial > Analysis Codes.

See Use analysis codes with invoices and sales orders.

Set up invoice and order items

Invoice and order items are just records of things you want to sell, but don't want to create a stock record for. You only need to set up invoice and order items if you need to use them.

You would generally use them if you're not using Stock Control. You can use them to keep a record of free text lines you regularly add to invoices and sales orders. These items can't be added to purchase orders.

Each item has a code, price, notional cost, default VAT rate and default nominal code. They are added to invoices and sales orders as stock items.

To use invoice and order items:

1. Make sure you choose to use Both standard and free text items in the Invoice and Order settings.

2. Create your invoice and orders items:

   Open: Settings > Invoicing and Sales Orders > Sales Order Items.

See Create invoice and order items.