I was very happy to see the addition of Purchase Orders to your system last year.
I would like to suggest a Sales Orders system to mirror this on the sales side.
To be able to provide customers with a sales order pdf to show acknowledgement of their order with us would be a most helpful feature. This would allow the locking in of the cost to them as we can often provide a number of estimates before finally agreeing to the sale. This could also help us provide different information that would not be on an estimate, e.g. expected delivery date now that the order has been processed. These could also be included with the delivery for the customer to check package contents as the delivery address and the invoice address are often different.
Also to be able to convert an estimate to a sales order then convert a sales order to invoice would be brilliant.
I think this all ties in with another couple of threads I have read that request different bits of supporting paperwork to go with an order. If this was added then I can see it shouldnāt be too much of a challenge (!) to add packing slips & delivery notes as well. Currently our delivery notes and packing slips are basically the invoice with no sums and fees on.
Yes we have to do this as well, we end up having to remove all the money information, save it, pdf it, print and post, then redo the invoice with the sums and save pdf and print & post again.
I think given a sales ordering system which is a very common accounting based feature, one could adapt the range on features available to suit your requirements much easier.
However, and tell me if iām wrong here, arenāt packings slips etc usually associated with stock level / inventory management, i cant see QuickFile venturing into that area.
I suppose the same document but with a different header would be easy to do, just so you had the option to āprint asā delivery note etc, then you would have the necessary paperwork to send and to get a customer signature on to confirm receipt of the goods.
The other posts you mention, would you mind posting the link.
I think there was another one along similar lines so Iām sure thereāll be something if you have a search for it.
In our case the inventory/stock management is separate as the products we attach delivery notes and packing slips etc to are generally a finished product that is made up of various components from our stores. We are effectively running 2 separate systems so we get a job card sent to the workshop (as in an actual piece of paper produced from the PO that is received by the sales dept.). The workshop then builds the product and keeps inventory levels etc in check within the workshop system. Once the product is finished then the item is sent to the packing/dispatch dept. and the job card is sent back to the accounts dept. who then raise the invoice. At the same time as the invoice is raised then all of the supporting paperwork is produced, i.e. delivery notes and packing slips and this is then sent to the dispatch dept. to be attached to the product before being shipped out.
Seems complicated now I write it down! It would be handy to have all of this tied up within a single system but there isnāt one that doesnāt bolt on a load of complicated nonsense as well so it is a bit of a catch 22, either make the process more complicated with more tools that arenāt required or keep as it is with a semi manual process that works pretty well.
The problem we have is that QuickFile canāt replace the accounts software that we currently use due to not being able to easily print out a set of delivery notes and packing slips. Absolutely no inventory system is required for us to be able to do that and keep our current workflow intact.
ETA: As a bit of a workaround I suppose I could do some CSS editing so I could print 3 invoices off each with a different template applied. This does seem rather long winded and counter intuitive for the users though. It may work for now, but to have a simple delivery note/packing slip generated from the invoice would be better.
As i mentioned earlier, possibly a āprint invoice as delivery noteā and āprint invoice as packing slipā feature which would create a PDF with different headers but without the costings on would be of great benefit to us both.
Have you got any thoughts on this @Glenn? Just wondering if it is in the pending tray or not before possibly crafting an alternative solution myself, at some point.
Iām afraid itās not likely to be something we will be looking into in the next 3-4 months. The PO system took a few weeks to implement and fully test, I suspect something like this would be as (if not more) complicated.
Rather than emulate the PO system it may be better that we develop something that can template from a DRAFT invoice. It could use mail-merge tokens to embed information from the invoice and a WYSIWYG editor so you can pretty much customise and name the document how you prefer. The DRAFT invoice can then be converted to SENT later on.
Iām really just thinking out loud with this, but Iād prefer a more flexible solution. There are so many different types of documents in accounting itās difficult to develop a solution for each, plus it adds a lot of bloat to the software and makes it harder and more expensive for us to maintain it in the long run. I definitely see a use for these things, Iām just trying to find the most lightweight implementation.
I appreciate all of these simple little tweaks soon add up and become more complex, I suffer from quite a bit of project creep myself!
All I need for now is to be able to produce a packing slip and/or despatch note so I will probably just create a custom form within our intranet to extract the relevant data from the invoice via the API.
Are you generating these slips just to be printed and included in any outbound deliveries? You could probably achieve this using one API call (invoice_get), then just populate it into a simple web page. My idea was to eventually have some add-on page builder and then just connect to the API to pull in the data and bind it to a custom template. If you need any help with the API let me know.
Yes, thatās pretty much what I was thinking of doing. Currently despatch notes and packing slips are produced by Sage and these are basically just the invoice but without any values on the product lines.
Hi - I find I am also being hampered by the functionality here. (or possibly I am doing it wrong?)
As a company, we take a 30% deposit payment, and then later the balancing 70%
Currently, I just post the final invoice (via batch uploads), and then have to manually allocate two bank payments (30% & 70%) to the appropriate invoice.
As the payment is split into two parts, the invoice matching feature doesnāt work (it could at least match the remaining 70%)
What would also be a great feature is to be able to do a string search on the list of potentially matching invoices - rather than having to scroll through a rather long list and visually match. It is also a pain having to click āshow more invoicesā if the matching invoice is further down the list - itās pretty time consuming matching 100+ invoices to 200+ payments
@Glenn Can you please DM me about the API and I would be happy to help create a template page for our needs and also share with others to enable them with the same issue.
Basically - we have to issue a Performa Invoice (Another name for Estimate / Pre invoice) as shipping and invoicing can only happen post 30% advance. At shipping we need to issue a Commercial Invoice (Another name for Invoice) and Packing List (as mentioned aboveā¦just same thing as an invoice but without any price and contains shipping details).
I share the pain with you. Often we have the payment in advance to an invoice (30%) and would just make our lives easier to enter Invoice number when tagging and reconciling payments from Bank account screen.
Can I add my request for a order confirmation feature. At a basic level it could sit between estimates and invoices and could be siwtched on/off either fully of by client in the settings or client management screens so that not everyone has to use it.
At this basic level it could be just a version of a draft invoice with different title and headings.
Of course in future it would be better if there was a sales order feature which could have a one to many relationship with invoices and order confirmations would be an offshoot of this.