Automated sales order processing for inventory

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[Music] so you know within zoho inventory one little difference between inventory and books if you watched our books webinar is that books is kind of built to start from an estimate you don't have to over there but that's normally going to be your step one within inventory you don't use estimates things just go straight in as a sales order down here at the bottom zoho gives this excellent little graphic which kind of disappears once you create your first order um where it kind of gives you what that timeline is and what the life cycle is of a sales order right so we're either going to send an estimate or create a sales order from a customer request once we confirm that sales order we can go ahead and convert it to an invoice to be paid and a package to actually ship it out and if necessary we can turn that sales order into a purchase order to actually you know backfill whichever stock we're using to fulfill it so i'll go through this next section kind of quickly here of setting one up again pretty similar to what we talked about in the books webinar um but to get one added here we'll go up to the top right and we'll click new we'll need to fill in our customer app first and it's going to give us a quick look at their billing and shipping address that we have on file you can actually edit those or change those from here if need be additionally there under the customer name we can link this to a potential or deal or opportunity in the crm if necessary so if you are running things both ways you might want to just create that connection so that it's visible within the crm running down the page of course we'll have our sales order number our order date our expected shipping date you know what our payment term should be you can add a delivery method if you already know what that's going to be at the time that you're creating this and then of course you can log it to an existing sales person if you're running any commissions based on these orders then down below kind of similar to creating this inside of books uh we'll add any of our products that we're going to sell what quantity we have what quantity we're selling for those products and what the rate and discount should be um we'll see there as well within that quantity column it's actually showing us how many pieces we have so if you are kind of on the phone working with someone you can make sure that you're not going to sell more than you currently have on stock because it's going to give you that snapshot every time that you add one of these items to an existing sales order and so from there once we've sent that out and got it all confirmed it's kind of time for our two different branches i'm going to go through the packaging flow first and kind of in a little bit more detail and then we'll quickly touch on invoicing because again very similar to what you're doing in books it's just the payable version of that sales order so once we have a confirmed sales order we can go ahead and create our package here on the page if you're not getting that popup it'll be in the top right under the create drop down but this should be there for you for most of your sales orders as we do this you can actually go ahead and assign it its package slip number you can have it auto-generate those or you can fill them in just based on your business process up in the top right is where you'll see the evaluate packaging geometry again i won't go too much into detail there for right now but basically what that's going to do is look at those dimensions and weights and try to feed you what might be an appropriate standard box size to ship out with usps or ups or you know whichever your platform is um you know as we're getting these items packaged as well uh by default if i don't do anything here and i just click save it's gonna assume that we're gonna pack all of the items on the sales order but you don't actually have to do that i could say that i'm going to partially ship this right maybe i'm shipping just line items a and b but i'm not going to ship item c until they pay right or maybe we're out of stock so we're just going to ship a couple of these so you can basically track it that way and make sure that everything's getting packaged as it needs to just one last thing to highlight on that is that you know it's kind of a use case where not all sales orders all get shipped at once and so it's pretty common that you might actually just be creating multiple packages off of one sales order so you have the tools to do that here with inventory and so once we have our package created here it's kind of in a holding pattern so if we think about where this would be in your real process this is now boxed it does not have a label on it yet but now we're ready to actually put that label on and get it shipped out the door and so up in the top right we can use that ship button and go ahead and create our shipment order to actually send this off to our customer now if you have a usps or ups integration already created you can go ahead and ship this via carrier if you're running with something like easy ship then this package is going to automatically sync over there and you'll actually do the rest of your workflow just from inside of easyship in this case we'll go ahead and walk through what the manual shipping process looks like and how you would record this within inventory one little note around this is that it's pretty important to try to get things shipped out as quick as possible within inventory because the physical account or your physical stock on hand is based on those shipments not just putting something in a package but actually shipping it out the door is what will decrease your inventory count so if you are in a place where you're kind of tight on inventory and want to make sure you're not getting very back ordered getting those shipments processed is going to be the best way to stay on top of that and so in this case we're shipping this out manually which is kind of just we're not printing the label through here we're kind of telling zoho inventory that this has been shipped you know you can add in your shipment number what data was shipped what carrier you can add in your tracking number or tracking url that's really nice to do because your standard email templates around shipments are going to include that information so if you are going to ship it manually you want to make sure to always add those so those emails are as useful as possible for the customer of course last but not least you can say what you actually paid to ship this so that you're able to calculate your costs properly on fulfillment and then we have our shipment so at this point it's kind of in the shipped status so it's not yet been delivered of course in the top right we can go ahead and mark it as delivered later once it hits the customer's location and circling back to that original image that brett kind of showed here we've now moved it off of that packages not ship stage into our shipped packages so the last step is really just recording that has been delivered and then that sales process would be complete now again kind of a last step here that i'll go through quickly of course we're going to want to convert our sales order to an invoice as well to actually get paid on this so jumping back to our sales order kind of being home base we'll go ahead and convert this to an invoice of course we'll see it's going to go to that same customer by default it's going to have all of our same items and so we can go ahead and just save and send that right out to that customer so now with our invoice in cent status i'm going to go ahead and jump back over to the sales order where we can kind of see the whole life cycle of this so again the sales order really connects the billing part of sales to the fulfillment part of sales and so from our sales order we can actually see the invoice up here at the top and then we can see that package up at the top as well so it kind of becomes the primary record that you use to check in on anything else that's happening