Open Source ERP Guru

In our last few posts, we prepared our Openbravo system by creating a new Client system and created master data objects required for the creation of our first sales order – customer and product. Creating a sales order will complete the first sub-process of the Order-To-Cash core business process. As always, this guide is accompanied by a recorded flash tutorial.

Sales Order in ERP systems

The most basic transaction (and hopefully the highest volume transaction) in ERP systems is a sales order. Sales orders include two parts:

• Header – Sales order header usually contains information such as order type, customer name, open date, payment terms, customer address information and customers’ purchase order number.
• Lines – The sales order details include at least one line item. Each line item contains a product, order quantity and unit price. Additional line information might be discount rate,requested date and promised delivery date, among others.

Sales Order Lifecycle

Sales orders have a lifecycle of their own. Lifecycle steps are:

• Quotation – Often, a sales order would start as a quotation sent to a customer. Most open source ERP software will support that stage of a sales order, although some companies do not need to handle quotations.
• Confirmed sales order – If a quotation was approved by the customer, it can then be turned into a sales order. Once the sales order have been confirmed, a stock availability check is performed. Its a business decision on how to behave in case stock is available to fulfill the entire order or not.
• Partially completed – If only part of the stock exist, a company might decide to wait for the entire stock to become available – though purchasing or production- until the order is shipped. It might also decide to send partial quantities, until the entire order is fulfilled. In that case the order is Completed.
• Completed – In case enough stock exists to fulfill the order, it makes sense to ship all products to the customer to cover the entire order.
• Invoiced – When all item lines of a single order have been delivered, the order is Completed. An invoice is produced and sent to the customer.

All modern open source ERP solutions support this lifecycle as it is the most basic business requirement from and ERP system. There are, of course, many variation and special circumstances that must be supported by an ERP system, but that is the subject of a separate post.

Creating Sales Order in Openbravo open source ERP

One of Openbravo’s greatest strength in comparison to other open source ERP solutions is its user experience-creating new sales order is straight forward, the entire process contained to a single screen.

To make things even easier for us, Openbravo offers two ways to create a sales order- Simple Sales Order and Sales Order. The idea behind having two transactions is that for some companies, most sales orders are very basic, and require only customer name, products lines and quantity.
We will use the Simple Sales Order transaction to create our first sales order in Openbravo.

The Wiki entry for creating customer order explains in details all the fields involved in the sales order header and details.

Openbravo Create Sales Order Flash Tutorial

[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/openbravocreatesalesorder.swf" height="550" width="885" /]