Order Fulfilment, Contract Billing and the Customer 360

A confirmed sales order with stock lines has a Fulfilment card for people with the permission to manage fulfilment. The table lists each item with Ordered, Picked, Packed, Shipped, Delivered and Checked out, and a State. Enter quantities under Pick now and click Record picked, or Pick everything. Then Mark picked as packed. Ship takes a Carrier, a Tracking no., a Shipped on date and Notes, and ships what is picked and not yet shipped. Each shipment is listed with its number, and Mark delivered records the date, Received by and delivery notes. Quantities only move forward: you cannot pack more than you picked or ship more than you picked.

The order’s fulfilment state is separate from its commercial status. The status says whether the order is confirmed or invoiced; the fulfilment state reads Not picked, Picking, Picked, Packed, Partly shipped, Shipped, Partly delivered or Delivered. Service and custom lines are never picked, so an order made only of them reads Nothing to ship. The Pick list document gives the warehouse a printable list to pick from, in preview or download.

In practice: a Nakuru animal-feed distributor confirms an order for 200 bags of dairy meal. The store picks 120 that afternoon with Record picked, packs them, and ships them with the carrier “Own lorry KDA 457B” and the driver’s trip sheet number as tracking. The farm’s storekeeper signs, so the shipment is marked delivered with Received by “Peter Kiprono”. The order reads Partly delivered until the other 80 bags follow.

Shipping is logistics, not stock. Confirming an order reserves the stock; the goods leave the books, with their cost of sales, when the invoice raised from the order is checked out and the checkout is approved. A shipment never deducts stock as well, so an order is never taken off the shelf twice. The Checked out column shows what has left the books beside what has shipped, and if goods ship ahead of the checkout, the card says so: they stay on the books until it is done.

A shipment that has not been delivered can be called back with Cancel shipment and a reason, for example that the carrier did not collect. The goods count as picked and packed again, ready to ship, and no stock moves because the shipment never moved any. A delivered shipment cannot be cancelled, and an order that has partly shipped cannot be cancelled either: invoice what shipped, then release the rest of the stock.

The invoice and the sales order both show a Finance posting preview: the receivable, each income account, the tax, and for stock lines the cost of goods, as debits and credits. It is built by the same code that posts the journal, so it cannot show one thing and post another. It also says when it will post: on approval for an invoice with no stock lines, and when the stock leaves on approval of the checkout otherwise. The cost line is an estimate at today’s unit cost, because the checkout stamps the cost when the goods actually leave. In practice, a finance officer checking a USD order sees the rate it will be converted at, or a note that nothing will reach the ledger until a rate is recorded.

Contract Billing is in the Sales quick actions and on the Sales overview. New contract asks for a Title, Customer, Starts on and Ends on, a Contract value before tax, the Service billed (or a custom line with the contract title), Days to pay, Notes on each invoice, and a Billing schedule: Even instalments (monthly or quarterly), Fixed amounts on fixed dates, or Percentage of value at milestones. For fixed and percentage schedules you list each milestone with a name and date, and the amounts must add up to the contract value, or the percentages to 100. A contract bills a service; a stock item is refused, because goods are sold on a sales order.

Every morning at 06:20 AWRA raises one invoice for each milestone that has fallen due, and Bill now raises a milestone’s invoice today instead. A milestone is billed once and only once, even if two people press Bill now. The invoice is built like any typed invoice, with numbering, tax and the credit check. With Issue each invoice automatically ticked it is issued and filed to eTIMS where that is on; otherwise it waits as a draft for someone to review. A milestone that fails to bill stays billable, is retried the next morning, and its owner is told the first time.

The contract page shows Contract value, Billed, Remaining, and whether invoices are issued or left as drafts, with the milestones listed by date, amount, status and invoice. Cancel contract stops every unbilled milestone and leaves raised invoices as they are. In practice: a Kigali IT firm signs a RWF 12,000,000 annual support contract with a bank, billed 25% on signing and 25% each quarter after. The first invoice is raised on the signing date, and the others arrive on their dates without anyone setting a reminder.

Contracts change: a price rise, an extension, a milestone moved. Edit opens the same form with a Billed milestones section at the top, marked with a lock. A billed milestone already has an invoice, so its name, date, amount and percentage never change and it is never deleted. Everything still to bill is rebuilt from your edit, and the whole schedule, billed plus unbilled, must still add up to the contract value.

Two terms lock once anything has been billed: the customer, because the invoices are theirs, and the schedule type. The value cannot be lowered below what has already been invoiced, and the start and end dates cannot move past a billed milestone. If the morning run bills a milestone while your form is open, saving treats it as billed rather than overwriting it. Each changed field is written to the audit trail with its old and new value.

In practice: a Lusaka security company has billed four of twelve monthly instalments of ZMW 45,000 on a guarding contract when the client adds a second site from month five. The account manager raises the contract value by ZMW 160,000. The four billed months stay exactly as invoiced and locked, and the remaining eight instalments are recalculated to carry the new total.

A customer page opens with Account health: the overdue balance, how much of the credit limit is used, invoices on credit hold, the dunning stage reached, failed or reversed payments in the last 12 months and, for people who can see tickets, open support tickets. Each signal is marked when it needs attention. The Timeline below is one newest-first list drawn from twelve sources: invoices, payments, credit notes, payment reminders, statements sent, quotes, sales orders, POS sales, support tickets, contacts, documents and visits.

Each source is shown only to people who may open those records, so a user without access to POS sales does not see them here either, and every entry links to its record. Filter the timeline by type to look at one kind at a time. The same service feeds the web page and the mobile app, so the two can never show a different history.

Log a visit records a field visit with When, Outcome (Positive, Neutral, Negative or No one available), Follow up on, Purpose and Notes. In the mobile app a visit can also carry the phone’s location and be logged with no signal; it is sent when the phone is back online and is never saved twice. In practice: a sales rep in Eldoret visits a farm co-operative, logs “Wants 20 more cartons before month end” with a follow-up for the 25th, and her manager sees the visit on the timeline beside the overdue invoice she was also there to discuss.