The Sales Order Between Tuesday and Monday
A customer confirms an order on Tuesday, you deliver on Friday, you invoice on Monday. In most businesses that interval lives in a WhatsApp message. Here it lives in a sales order — this is what the order actually does between Tuesday and Monday, and the two places where it hands the decision to a person.
A customer calls on Tuesday and confirms they want forty units. You have thirty-eight. You order more, you deliver on Friday, and you invoice on Monday when the paperwork catches up.
Ask where that commitment lived between Tuesday and Monday and the answer, in most businesses, is a message thread and the memory of whoever took the call. Ask what happened to the thirty-eight units in the meantime and the answer is that they stayed available, because nothing told the system they were spoken for.
A sales order is what closes that gap. Customer quotes, sales orders, proformas, customer price lists and stock reservations are all in the product, so the useful question is what the order does on each of those days, and where it deliberately stops.
What a sales order is for
It looks like an administrative document and it is doing four jobs, which is why businesses that lack one feel it in four unrelated places — and why it is worth checking each job separately rather than ticking “has sales orders”.
- It records a commitment. Somebody agreed to supply something at a price. Here that is a numbered order, raised directly or converted from the quote the customer accepted, carrying the customer’s own reference.
- It reserves stock. Confirming the order promises its stock at the order’s warehouse. What is on the shelf is held; what is short is backordered, and filled oldest-first as stock arrives.
- It carries the price. Lines are priced once, from the customer’s price list, and copied forward. The invoice bills what the customer accepted, even if the list has moved since.
- It bridges the timing gap. The order can be invoiced whole or in parts, with the invoiced quantity tracked on each line, so a forty-unit order shipped as thirty-eight and then two stays one commitment.
Ask where the commitment lived between Tuesday and Monday. It should be a document you can open, with the stock already set aside for it.
Where the sales record starts
It starts at the quote. A quote goes to the customer by email with a signed link: they open it with no login, read it, and accept or decline it, giving a name and, if they decline, a reason. Whoever wrote the quote is told straight away. The same quote appears in the customer portal alongside their invoices and statement.
One source of confusion is worth clearing up: the system also has procurement quotations, which belong to a supplier and a request for quotation. Those are your buying side. The customer quote is a separate document with its own number, its own validity date, and a daily job that marks it expired once that date passes, so a three-month-old price is not honoured by accident.
| Stage | Document here |
|---|---|
| Customer enquires, you quote | A customer quote, priced from their price list, with a validity date |
| Customer accepts | The signed link: accept or decline with no login, and the author is notified |
| Customer wants something to pay against | A proforma, printed from the quote or the order and never filed to eTIMS |
| Customer confirms an order | A sales order; confirming it reserves the stock and backorders the shortfall |
| Customer is billed | An invoice from the order, whole or in parts; the credit check runs here |
| Stock leaves | The invoice’s checkout, drawing on the order’s reservation |
| Customer pays | A payment matched to that invoice, from your side or the portal |
So the chain most sales software describes is here in full, with one link worth reading closely: the stock leaves through the invoice’s checkout rather than through a separate delivery document. That ordering matters for credit, and it is the next section.
The consequence people notice first
Credit checking. Credit limits with live exposure are real here and they place a hold — one of the few controls in the system that refuses rather than reports.
It fires at invoicing, and that is a choice rather than a consequence of the order having nowhere else to be checked. The honest description is this: confirming an order does not check credit. A customer already over their limit can have an order confirmed and stock reserved for them, and the hold appears when that order is invoiced.
What makes that tolerable is the ordering above. Stock leaves through the invoice’s checkout, and a checkout on an invoice under credit hold is refused until somebody overrides it — with their name and a reason recorded. So the goods do not leave against a held invoice. The cost of the late check is that the reservation sits on the shelf for a customer you may not supply, which is a stock problem rather than a bad-debt one.
The habit that covers the interval
Look at the customer’s exposure before you confirm a large order, not after. The limit and the open balance are on the customer’s record. For an account near its limit, raise the invoice for the first part of the order on the day you confirm it, so the check runs while the reservation is still cheap to release. For stable accounts, invoice each shipment as it goes, which is the order’s natural rhythm anyway.
Reserving stock with an order
The second consequence of a commitment that lives in a message is that stock promised to a customer stays available to everybody. That is the part the order changes most.
Confirming an order reserves its stock lines at the order’s warehouse, as much as is free. Reserved stock cannot be sold at the till, transferred to another branch, checked out manually or returned to a supplier — every one of those paths asks the same question before it takes stock, so none of them can forget to. The order’s own invoice checkout draws on its reservation. If you had thirty-eight of forty, the other two are backordered, and when stock arrives the oldest backorder is filled first. Cancelling the order releases what is left.
Reservations are held per warehouse rather than per shelf or batch: the promise is “forty of these from Nairobi”, and your picking rotation still decides which forty. Stock you want to hold without an order — a customer collecting on Friday, materials for a job — can be held by hand with a note, a customer and an expiry, and is released automatically once the expiry passes.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Customer quotes with a validity date that expires on its own, sent with a signed link the customer can accept or decline without logging in, and visible in the customer portal.
- Sales orders, raised directly or converted from a quote, invoiced whole or in parts with the invoiced quantity tracked on each line and over-invoicing refused.
- Proformas printed from a quote or an order, which take no invoice number and are never filed to eTIMS.
- Customer price lists — the customer’s own list, then the default list, then the item price — with quantity breaks, bounded by currency and by date.
- Stock reservations on order confirmation, per warehouse, with the shortfall backordered and filled oldest-first, and reserved stock refused to the till, transfers and other checkouts.
- Credit limits with live exposure that place a real hold at invoicing, and a checkout that refuses a held invoice until the hold is overridden with a name and a reason.
More we can add to your workspace
- A credit check at order confirmation, so an order for a customer over their limit is held before its stock is reserved rather than when it is invoiced.
- A delivery note as a distinct document — what was packed, signed for by the customer, with the invoice raised from it. Today the invoice’s checkout is the record of what left.
- A pick list from the confirmed order, so the store works from the order rather than from the invoice.
- Discount authority on quote and order lines. Every discount is recorded on the line; a limit by role, and an approval above it, is the build.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will not call an order an invoice. A commitment and a bill are different documents, and treating the first as the second would put unbilled promises into your receivables and every figure built on them.
- We will not reserve stock silently on your behalf. A reservation comes from a confirmed order or a hold somebody placed with a reason, because availability that nobody can reconstruct is worse than availability that is approximate.
A credit check at confirmation, a delivery note and a pick list are each scoped work on top of machinery that already exists — the order, the reservation, the credit gate and the document numbering are all in place, so these add documents and a check rather than a foundation.
Weigh this against how you actually sell. A counter business, a service business invoicing on completion, and a business whose customers pay before dispatch use the order lightly or not at all. A distributor taking orders on Tuesday for Friday delivery on thirty-day terms uses all of it, and should decide deliberately who looks at credit before an order is confirmed.
Anything above that you need, we can build for you
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do for your organisation. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are both in the product because clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself, and the same door is open for whatever you just read about. One qualification so this is worth what it claims: a small number of things on this blog we deliberately leave to a specialist rather than build — a statutory ledger we will not sign our name to, a rule that would decide a tax question for you, a clinical or member-funds record that belongs in a regulated system — and where that is true the post says so in those words. Everything else is a scope, a timeline and a price.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
The module-shaped additions, which are the ones readers ask for most often
A price list with real discount authority, a customer-facing quotation that expires, a bill of materials or recipe costing, a staff advance that is issued, acquitted and chased, a member or unit ledger, a matching rule that holds a payment. Each of these is a build rather than a setting, and each has been quoted before — a bigger piece of work than a custom field, with a written spec and a date instead of a roadmap slide.
The report, document or pack nothing currently produces
The board pack in the shape your board actually asks for, a donor or funder layout, an invoice or receipt template carrying what your regulator or your customer expects, a dataset the report builder cannot reach yet. Usually the fastest thing on this list to deliver, because the data is already in the system.
Systems, rails and hardware you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store, core banking or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed. Plus the physical edge: a scanner, a scale, a weighbridge or a till peripheral feeding the door it belongs to.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. Nothing here waits on a regulator or a published specification, which is why operational builds are the ones we quote fastest. Tell us the requirement that would otherwise rule us out — that is a better first conversation than a demo.
Tell us what your operation needsRunning with one
An order system changes the habits that matter rather than removing them. Five are worth deciding on day one.
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Decide which sales start as a quote
Not all of them. A repeat order from a stable account can go straight to an order. Anything priced specially, anything large and anything for a new customer should start as a quote with a validity date, so the price was accepted in writing before stock was promised.
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Set the order’s warehouse every time
The reservation is made at the order’s warehouse. An order confirmed against the wrong branch reserves the wrong shelf, and the right one stays available to everybody.
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Decide who looks at credit before confirming
The check runs at invoicing, not confirmation. Write down who looks at exposure before a large order is confirmed and above what value, or it will happen inconsistently.
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Invoice what you ship, as you ship it
Invoice the part of the order that is leaving, and leave the rest open on the order. The remaining quantity stays reserved or backordered, and the customer is never billed for units still on your shelf.
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Review open orders weekly
Confirmed and partly invoiced orders are your list of promises not yet kept. Anything old on it is either waiting on stock, or delivered and not invoiced — and the second one is the expensive one.
That last step is the single most valuable property of a sales order: it is a list of things agreed and not yet completed, kept by the system rather than by a person. The weekly look is what turns the list into money.
What to ask a vendor about this
If you are comparing systems, the sales order is an area where “yes, we have one” covers a very wide range of behaviour, and the questions that separate them are specific. Ask them of us too; here is where each lands.
The order questions worth asking
- Does raising an order reserve the stock, or only record the intention? Here, confirming it reserves the stock — ask to see availability before and after.
- What happens when only part of an order is delivered? Here, the remainder stays on the order, reserved or backordered, and is invoiced when it ships.
- Does the credit check happen at order stage or at invoicing? Here, at invoicing — and the held invoice cannot be checked out.
- Can an order be invoiced twice? Here, each line tracks what has been invoiced, and invoicing more than remains is refused.
- Does the price on the order survive to the invoice, or is it re-derived from whatever the price is by then? Here, it is copied.
- Is the delivery note a document the customer signs, and is the invoice raised from it? Here, the invoice’s checkout records what left; a signed delivery note is one we can add.
The fifth question catches more systems than any of the others. An order that records a price and an invoice that recalculates it are a combination that produces exactly the argument the order was supposed to prevent.
The credit control itself is in credit limits, the pricing side in quotations, price lists and discount control, and the wider chain in sales software in Kenya.
Our take
If you sell across a counter, invoice on completion, or take payment before dispatch, you will use the order lightly and that is fine. If you take orders on Tuesday for Friday delivery on credit terms, the order does the work a message thread cannot: it records the commitment at the price the customer accepted, reserves the stock and backorders the rest, and lets you invoice what ships as it ships. The two places it hands the decision to a person are credit, which is checked at invoicing rather than confirmation, and the delivery itself, which is recorded by the invoice’s checkout rather than a signed note. Decide who looks at exposure before a large order is confirmed, invoice each shipment as it leaves, and review open orders weekly.
See the sales chain end to end
Customer quotes with a signed accept link, orders that reserve stock and backorder the rest, invoicing in parts, price lists per customer, and credit limits that place a real hold.
Explore sales managementFrequently asked questions
Does AWRA have sales orders?
Yes. An order is raised directly or converted from an accepted quote, confirmed to reserve its stock at its warehouse, and invoiced whole or in parts with the invoiced quantity tracked on each line. An order can be cancelled until it is invoiced, which releases its reservation; after that you cancel or credit the invoice instead.
Can customers accept a quote themselves?
Yes. The quote email carries a signed link the customer opens without a login, where they can read the quote, download it and accept or decline it with their name and, for a decline, a reason. The answer is recorded on the quote and whoever wrote it is notified. Customers with portal access see the same quotes there. A quote past its validity date is marked expired overnight and can no longer be accepted.
Is stock reserved when a customer confirms an order?
Yes, when you confirm the order in the system. Its stock lines are reserved at the order’s warehouse as far as stock is free, and anything short is backordered and filled oldest-first as stock arrives. Reserved stock cannot be sold at the till, transferred, checked out manually or returned to a supplier; the order’s own invoice checkout draws on it. Stock you want to hold without an order can be held by hand with a note and an expiry.
Why does the credit check happen at invoicing rather than at the order?
Because that is where it is wired, and it is worth being plain that it is a choice rather than a constraint. Confirming an order does not check credit, so an order for a customer over their limit can be confirmed and its stock reserved. What protects you is that stock leaves through the invoice’s checkout, and a checkout on an invoice under credit hold is refused until somebody overrides it with a reason. A check at confirmation is one we can add.
How do we track partially delivered orders?
On the order. Invoice the quantity that is shipping, and the rest stays open on the order line, either reserved or backordered. The order shows as partly invoiced until every line is billed, and invoicing more than remains on a line is refused. The open-orders list is the record of what you still owe customers.
Is there a delivery note?
Not as a separate document. The invoice’s checkout is the stock movement and records what left, against the order’s reservation. A customer-signed delivery note, with the invoice raised from it, is a document we can add to your workspace; meanwhile, most businesses print the invoice or the order confirmation as the dispatch paperwork.
