Automated sales order processing in India

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foreign [Music] guys it's Sam daines from our dento here thanks for tuning in so today I'm bringing you a video which is focusing on Zoho inventory so Zoho inventory is the inventory control application within the Zoho Suite of products um it tightly integrates with Zoho books for bookkeeping and accounting purposes and it's widely used in e-commerce industry it has great integration to Shopify other e-commerce channels and just general wholesale distribution so if you are after an inventory control solution you should definitely check out Zoho inventory today's video though is going to be focused on a specific function that has been added to the software and it gives you the ability to automate the sales order cycle now I'll drill into this a little bit more but let's just talk about what automating the sales order cycle means when you're using a distribution system like Zoho inventory the distribution process from quote or order through to invoice is typically broken down into a few different transactional steps you've either got the quote or the sales order which is the Customs intention to buy the product so no stock is moved with these documents we're just talking about producing a document with the intent to purchase and listing our items and pricing on them and then you've got to go through the process of creating a shipment and a package so taking the products and going through your picking and packing process so Zoho inventory breaks this down into a shipment process and that needs to be completed and then the final step is generating the invoice and that's the financial document that you're going to give to your customer so that they can pay for the goods that you're Distributing so it's generally sort of three or four different transactional steps that you need to go through from the sales order process through to invoice and completing the process the automating sales order cycle lets you go through all of these steps in a more automated fashion so let's go through what that means to turn that on what you need to consider when you do turn it on and then what you actually can experience while it's enabled Okay so we've got a demo version of Zoho inventory open now um let's just walk through the steps of creating a normal sales order without any kind of automation turned on so you know we create a new sales order in the system here we select our customer and we would go through and populate the relevant products I'm pricing Etc and then the final step down the bottom here if I move my camera out of the way is save and send so by this is the only option that you've got available to you hit save and send it would send the email off you can cancel that and then when we're looking at the sales order you know it's essentially a draft State the next step is we have to mark it as confirmed and so then you know if you're looking at sales orders you can see across the top here Zoho does a nice job of indicating the status of this order using these columns here whether it's been invoice whether it's a payment received whether it's packed and shipped and has a little light in each one up but indicating where we're up to in the stage of that order so the next step generally speaking with the sales order is you need to um create a package which is packaging up the goods for um for shipment I've only got one in here and I'm going to complete the package process once you've completed the package package process you can complete the shipment process so I can either ship if I've got an integrated carrier set up in this instance I'm just going to ship manually I'm just going to choose one of the shipments that I've got are in there and I'll mark this shipment as delivered which is really just an indicator to say that this particular Shipment has been completed so I've already had to do three to five sort of steps in that process to be able to kind of get my my shipment um created I had to go through the pro uh the process of um confirming the the sales order packing it and shipping it and then I can go ahead and create my invoice so these are the steps that you'll probably be familiar with and the steps that you have to undertake when you are going through a normal sales order process so let's look at the new option which is to automate the sales order cycle and to enable this you need to go up to the settings area in Zoho inventory down to preferences and then if we go down um to sales orders under the preferences menu here we can see that there is an option here called automate the sales order cycle and it's disabled by default you need to turn that on what this option is doing is it's basically saying I want to skip over some of the steps in the process now it isn't actually skipping them it's just completing them automatically for you so for instance I can say look I just want it to automatically create the shipment and the and the package so we know we are going to dispatch this sales order in full we're not doing any partial shipments or partial package meaning if we're shipping if we've got 10 of an item on an order we're going to ship 10. we don't need to go through the individual steps and we want to just use like the same carrier the same um the same shipment preferences as to the status of the shipment here look generally speaking you know you can have it create an invoice as well I I like to separate the invoice process from the distribution process so I think probably the better options are just creating a package and creating a shipment I'm a leaving invoice unticked so this gives us the option to just go straight ahead from a sales order and have it do all of the shipment packaging steps and then allow us to create the invoice when necessary Zoho does point out a couple of things here which is worth noting before you enable this um you know you you have to execute the sales order from the detail page of the orders that have been imported so you know you have to cut if you've imported a stack of orders you've got to go through and execute those in a separate area transactions with custom Fields will with will be created with the custom field empty important if you've got custom fields on your sales order on your shipment record that you want to be filled out as you complete this process this this automated sales order cycle is just going to skip over those fields and they'll remain blank um you can't create packages or invoices if you've got serialized inventory enabled makes sense you're going to need to complete that serialized allocation um as part of the process so look that's common sense it's not going to be it's not going to make sense to automate the shipment and packaging process if you need to track serial numbers and it's just basically making mention of disabling custom functions that might interfere so if you have got complicated workflows or functions you want to evaluate those and how they interact with the creation of shipments and packages beforehand if you call all those options you can enable it and see how it behaves so we're going to go down and save our preferences now with the automate sales order cycle turned on and I'm going to create a brand new sales order so again I'm going to pick my Donald Duck Donald Duck farming customer I'm going to pick some items or an item with a couple of quantity in this instance maybe not 200 let's just go for two you'll immediately notice the button down the bottom now says save and confirm whereas before it was save and send so this is indicating that it's going to kind of trigger the automated sales order process we're going to click save and confirm here and you get this new window pop-up I really love how this has been implemented actually because it does give you some other options rather than it just going ahead and completing those automated documents you can say look I want to for this particular order just execute the sales order cycle in its entirety I'm going to click it it's going to power ahead and it's going to generate the package and the shipment automatically I want to overwrite the sales order cycle so I want it to go through the steps of automation but I want to sort of have some influence over what it's doing in those steps or do you know what for this order I'm going to need to go through the shipment process manually so I don't want it to be automated especially if you're not a partial shipment let's go override it's a great option because it just immediately gives you the option to untick some of them you can say look in this instance I do want to create the invoice I don't want to create this shipment or I want to change the shipment preferences almost recommend using this override option because it just gives you that option to double check what the automated steps are going to be if you're happy with the options there go ahead and create my package create my shipment and use these shipment preferences I can hit execute straight away um you get a message here that it's saying that it's being executed so there can be a small delay but you refresh it here and then once it's completed you you will find that it's going to have all of the statuses completed for you in those areas so we've got the ability to automate the shipment package and even invoice creating straight from a sales order really great time saver guys and a feature that if you're always finding man why do I have to go through all these individual steps to get my sales orders fulfilled in Zoho inventory enable this option and you can really take yourself through this process in a much more automated and efficient manner so guys I hope that was useful um check in soon for more great Zoho content chat soon