Optimize your sales order workflow for corporations

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hi this is john from pack i'm here with erhan from the tapas lunch company and we're going to run through the sales order workflow mega tutorial so this is a video version of the written document that we've got in the documentation section of our website uh it's just if you prefer to follow along with a video this is going to be uh better for you so the reason we've written such a sort of exhausting exhaustive documentation for this particular workflow is that this is the core of your day-to-day business in an in e-commerce business yeah it's what you're doing all day every day uh taking orders either via the website or via phone or whichever way the orders are coming into your system and you are following them through uh committing the stock dispatching them get taking payments for them um and i said yeah that's basically what you're doing all day every day so that's why it's important to really understand these workflows in depth um pac makes it quite easy for these workflows to basically not be linear so it doesn't have to go step by step in only one direction so orders can be in lots of different states at once and obviously that introduces a degree of complexity but it also makes the system very powerful and able to reflect reality so again that's why we've done uh such a detailed tutorial and hopefully we'll be able to make things a bit clearer in this uh in this video tutorial so um the main thing to start with the main thing we're going to start with now is item types okay and we've got a little matrix here in the uh in the written document but i'm going to show you now we're going to switch to our hands test account and we're going to go through the different types of different product types that you have available in pack and how those impact on the workflow because they do have a really important impact so if we go to inventory and we're going to particularly look at the list view item type because that shows the type of item down here down the right okay so if i just sort it into a different order backwards so stockable product is your standard product that's what you think about when you think of a product so it's a product that you buy and you want to track how much of it you've got in stock okay so that's pretty much in most businesses that's going to be 90 percent of what you're selling um and in fact we call that stockable product um and then other types of product if we just switch this up the second most important one is going to be non-stockable product that's again that's a product that you buy and you sell but you don't necessarily need to keep a tight count on how many you've got in stock okay so in other systems would be called like a non-inventory product or something like that um to give you an example let's say that you bulk buy screws from a screw supplier and you buy boxes of you know 10 kilos or 20 kilos of screws and you sell them by in little bags or something like that and you don't necessarily need to keep a unit count on how many you've got in stock because you're selling them bulk or something like that there's lots of examples of that especially in the food industry especially in your industry where you don't need to keep an exact um especially if you're selling by weight for example you know what i mean so you don't need to give an exact count on on how many you've got it's kind of useful to be able to do that and also other types of products like manufactured products you know i mean if you make custom making something on demand um then you're not although you are selling it it's still sellable it doesn't mean that it's not sellable it's just that it's not stockable you don't actually count how many you've got and then you've got another load of product types here on the right you can see digital items service other charge um and adjustment and there's a kind of things that go on order lines that aren't what you think about when you think of a physical product yeah so um a digital item like a code or something for a product services other random charges um adjustments adjustments can be positive or negative so they could be a line discount or a line extra charge these are all very similar these ones um we've we've made them different product types so more for like um ease of use internally they don't actually do anything particularly different like a digital item behaves very similar to how a service and and you can see that in the matrix here uh if you just scroll down here um so a stockable product can be dispatched sorry can be stocked and it can be dispatched right a non-stockable cannot be stock so you don't count the stock but it can still be dispatched but these other ones like a digital item a service you don't count them or dispatch them so they're kind of more abstract but still really useful to add and combine all these things on an order okay but of course the reason why we're talking about this now is because these product types are really important when it comes to seeing how uh order moves through the workflow the order workflow so um the way to understand uh sales order workflow is in terms of the order status okay and the status has four components the committed status the invoice status the dispatch status and the paid status okay those are the sort of four main tenants of order status and we're going to look now at some orders and um so this is a test account with loads of just uh test orders and we're just going to pick one um we looked at one a bit earlier which was quite a good example i think was 78 um yeah this is quite a good example so um first thing to note top right top left corner sorry next to the order reference is where you see the status labels okay so this is a really good example because you've got a status label for all four of those components of status that we just talked about committed invoice dispatched and paid so these statuses can move in different directions independently of each other mostly that's not not completely true but generally you you don't you know it doesn't have to be a step-by-step linear thing okay so um and we're going to talk about them one by one but you can see this order this order is completely committed completely invoiced completely dispatched and completely paid okay generally for each of these status components there's three possibilities there's not at all so not at all committed not at all invoiced um and when that's the case we don't display anything there so we don't actually write not committed you just don't see any committed message and then there's partially yeah and then there's fully okay so um we again we don't write the word fully but you can see here committed means fully committed okay so i think um i think we'll start with committed because that's the most complex right um just to recap how the stock system works in pack it's fully batch based right so um you you stock you you stock and you track stock through batches now if your business is the type of business which isn't the case with their handbag in other businesses that don't need to use batches you don't really have to use the batch system i mean it will be working under the covers but you don't actually have to pay any attention to it but if you want it it's there for you to track expiry dates and batch reference numbers so you can use it if you want to to track stock at a very granular level or you can just pay attention to the aggregate stock positions if you're not interested in batches but you've still got it there and again you don't it doesn't have to be either or across your whole business for some products you could use it and other products you don't uh use it for example his this is actually a really good example because on this order the pans on line two um there's just one batch called all pans and that's like we don't really care about tracking uh batches for this product we're just gonna have them all together and then for the other one the the olives the first line you can see that there is actually a um meaningful batch reference there and that's obviously being used and we could click through to that if we wanted to and see you know some details about that batch but we're not going to do that now so the basics of commitment impact are that if you choose a batch you've committed that stock that's that's the kind of main thing to hold in your head all right if a batch is not chosen obviously we're talking about stockable products here we're talking about the main type of product you choose a batch you committed the stock it's as simple as that right you don't choose a batch you don't commit the stock and that's because you can only commit stock from batches you know there's no you can't sort of commit stock from the general product pile because there is no general product pile you know i mean it's you you you commit from batches so and that's the easy way to think about it you know you you if i was to edit this actually i can't because it's dispatched uh let's refine another example um this one's dispatched as well so um we can create a new one um so let's quick let's quickly create a new a new order and we'll put me here as the customer and we will add some let's try and add some useful so these are um just we need to find an interesting product here that we can use okay like a manchego cheese that's a good one so oh there's an unavailable um that's actually perhaps not a bad idea let's do that let's just quickly fill in shipping and payment method um okay so what you can see here is that there is uh there's we ordered one one quantity and because no batch is chosen it's saying pending commit sure okay and then you see up in the status there's nothing because it's not committed it's not invoiced it's not anything so you don't see any it hasn't progressed along the workflow at all okay exactly so um pending commit is because there uh there's there's no batch been chosen now the problem here that we've got is there's actually none available of this product right because we've you know we've chosen a product which uh which doesn't have any available so we'll go and find something that is available now um so uh let's go to uh batches for example okay so this is the batch view and here we can see uh so pal triple o five has some products available okay so uh if we go back to where we were and we're going to add that let's just quickly search it out p a l triple o five i think it was so we can search that and add it and there are 83 available here that's 83 aggregated across all lots okay so at this point it's telling you uh the full stock availability um so let's just stick five on this order okay and save it okay so logically we didn't again we didn't choose a batch so it's not committed so um now let's get into the stage where we want to commit this stock to the customer because as you you know you take an order you should commit the stock as quick as possible exactly right two ways to do it you can either do it manually on the line okay and we'll do that first so go here i'll select a batch there's two batches it tells you how many are available from each batch so there's 83 aggregate available 10 from this batch 73 from this batch and those are the expiry dates so let's pick this one because that's the first expiry date available okay and save right what's happened here so we we chose a lot so this lot is committed but this this product here the first one we added is still not committed that's because we don't have the stock so now the status has changed to partially committed which is what you'd expect okay so um that's one way to do the commitment obviously if you've got a big order with lots of order lines you're not going to want to do that manually you're going to want you want to want the system to intelligently and of course it will let you do that so let's go edit it remove that lot assignment and go and save it again and now you see we're back to where we were before nothing's committed no commitment status right so we're going to use the intelligent auto committer now um we're not going to go deep into how this works but basically it prioritizes uh lots that either are expiring first sure or if there's no expiry dates to compare then lots that were sort of first in to the website stock rotation yeah it's like first in first out so we click commit and it does the auto commit for us so again we're just back to where we were now before like when we did it manually obviously if it's a big order that's going to be really quick if it can't commit the stock because there's no stock to commit it just won't do it um it will commit everything it can okay at any one point one thing to take into account is that on the default setup uh with your pac web stores this gets fired automatically when when an order comes in from a website so you don't have to go and manually do this for every single order okay it's logical good practice as soon as an order comes in you're going to want to auto commit the stock so that's basically commitment it's batch based um if you select a batch it's committed if you don't select a batch then it's back ordered yep okay so that's kind of our definition of back order sure that's if it's not committed so um if we look at this product this man 306. in fact actually let's focus on pl05 remove the commitment okay and now we're back to where we were before we've got five and it's pending commit so there should be five of this product back ordered if i go to the product record um and you can see here this is where we see the aggregate stock for the product yeah so this is the next level up from batch this is aggregated across all batches um five are backward and now those correspond to the five that we just left ha sort of dangling on that previous order so if we go back to that order edit it actually let's let's do the auto commit because that's quicker okay so again we've gone full cycle again we're partially committed but now if we go back to this um we'll see that that's no longer back ordered that stock that's now committed so now we've got 139 in total on hand 78 available 61 committed so available obviously as you know is just on hand take away committed okay let's go back to this order which we're working with and um let's just get rid of that tease that we don't have any stock of save it um you can clear commitments obviously you just click the clear commitment button then it will clear it and we can recommit and and we're good to go so i think that i think that does cover everything in commitments i might i might have forgotten something i might have to come back to something but that's fine so this is now fully committed you see that before when we were looking at the status we were seeing partial because now there's only one line on the order and it's and it's uh fully so this order is now fully committed which is great but it's not it's not invoiced it's not paid and it's not dispatched so it's the next step next cycle yeah so now we're on to the next thing so uh we kind of covered commitment status here and and this this essentially is like everything you need to know that's what we just said about we've said it around 100 times already you select a batch you committed the stock okay um now oh yes this is this good there's something that's mentioned in uh here in the so we talked about the in the automatic intelligent commitment um non-stockable products non-stockable products can't be committed because you don't stock them so if we i think we had an example of a of a sales order earlier we were looking at one was it yes these ones so um the weekend experience pack i think this is you know all of these are good examples of non-stockables not applicable because you can't there's you can't commit them because they're not stockable products again the auto committer knows that obviously yeah the auto committer will take that into account and it won't commit um it won't try to commit obviously because there's nothing it can do so you can see here that the status logic gets a little bit more complicated because here you've got a combination of stockables which is this one the first two this one and this one and the last two are stockables and then in the middle you've got four non-stockables but the overall status is obviously committed that's because everything that can be committed is committed yeah right so there's you know it wouldn't make any sense to call this a partially committed order even though not all the lines are committed but the lines that aren't committed is because they can't be committed does that make sense makes sense right cool um so that's commitment logic um the next thing that the tutorial covers is uh the invoice status now this is actually really simple okay for various reasons there's no such thing as partial invoicing in pack it's either invoiced or not invoiced and it sort of comes down to the fact that the way we approach the workflow of a sales order is a little bit different from other systems in that invoices receipts sorry dispatches of stock payments they're all inside the umbrella of the sales order so you basically you come to this sales order and everything you need to know about it is inside this view so um all of the dispatches will be on the dispatches tab all of the payments will be on the payments tab right and um the billing is the same thing but we don't allow multiple invoices against the same sales order so really all you need to do is choose an invoice at date so this the application of an invoiced at date makes a sales order an invoice okay so it's like you give it an invoice date it's invoiced so that's what you can see here this is an invoiced um order if i edit it get rid of the invoice date then that now it's gone now it's not there's no partial invoicing there's that you'll never see partially invoiced doesn't exist in this system it's either invoiced or not it's very clear yeah interestingly what we see here is that this order is paid but not invoiced okay that's interesting logically when you think about this workflow you normally think okay an order has to be invoiced before it can be paid but reality doesn't it's not that smooth a lot of the way sometimes for some reason or another you get a customer payment before you've even invoiced sure it does like a prepayment sure okay and then if that happens you're going to see some weird stuff happening on the outside normally the outstanding balance is positive which means that the customer uh owes you money got it right because you create an order this is like especially in wholesale you'll create an order you'll invoice it and then the customer owes you money okay um in this case it's the other way around you haven't invoiced this order but they've already paid you so it's like you owe them money but of course you don't really because when you edit it um the invoice date um in billing sorry invoice day let's invoice it first of all it's 2020 save and now and now everything's back to how you understand that it should be right because the outstanding balance is zero because it's invoiced and it's paid okay um so that's pretty much everything you need to know about invoice status the fact that it's just a date it can't be partially invoiced and um it interacts with payments in ways that you you know depending on how much experience you've got with this you might or might not expect but it does allow to capture all the reality of the messy sort of uh you know lots of different either wholesale or retail any combination of those different workflows okay so that's essentially invoice status um there are bulk controls for a lot of this stuff which we haven't really covered but we don't really it's kind of fairly obvious so if i go to pending i don't know if there are going to be any pending invoice here um but so this is the pending invoice obviously the sales order list views are kind of ordered by workflow action so we create these lists so that you have somewhere quick to go and say right what have i got this pending invoice here and then i can i can choose invoice action and then i can say right i want to do these three and you can submit the you know all it's going to do is set a date on them um so this is not the most useful um action but there are much more useful actions so um pending dispatch i think that's the next one in the tutorial uh yeah it is right we'll come on to this one now so this one's a little bit more complex so um this was the order that we were working on right so this is a committed order pending dispatch dispatch dispatchers can be complicated that means it doesn't it's not just one dispatch all the products you can have multiple dispatchers with multiple combinations of the products on them okay so that will be here in the dispatch um you can manually create them you wouldn't normally do this this is quite labor-intensive but sometimes you need to make small tweaks to dispatches you can do it here so you'll add a new dispatch um and then dispatches have a date they have a carrier tracking code and then you would add a new dispatch line and then you would select what you've been what you've dispatched and everything but actually like i said that's not particularly useful it will be much better to do use the auto dispatcher which is a bit like the auto committer and that it applies some intelligence to the process dispatch so let's say we dispatch with the courier dpd a tracking code test and is that today's date yeah 18th so let's say we're doing this in the afternoon after we've just done our daily dispatch yeah so we'll do that and we'll click confirm so um again that was just this particular um we just did that for one order normally you do this bulk and i'll show you that in a second but for one order you might want to do it and we just did it here so go to this batches tab and that's what it did for us basically just it created a single dispatch with all of the committed and dispatchable products and now this is where we come back to this product type thing that we talked about at the beginning right because remember we talked we talked about these products here which are not only are they non-stockables but they're also non-dispatchables so the dispatcher will take that into account it's not going to try to dispatch a discount or a digital item or something like that okay so in this case it was a stockable and dispatchable item and it's been and it was committed that's the other thing it's not gonna it has to be committed to be dispatched so that's what it's done here it's um it's dispatched and it's done all the logic for us um i don't know if i'm gonna be able to show you so if i go to sales sales or just pending dispatch we do have some pending dispatch right and you can see in here that the status so some of these are not dispatched at all some of them are partially dispatched you can use the auto dispatcher on partially dispatched ones you're not going to delete any ones that are previously created it will take into account it will consider that you're dispatching the remainder does that make sense you can use the auto dispatcher multiple times on one one order over and over again let's say you the easiest workflow is use it once if and then let's say there's one or two products you didn't send just delete them from the dispatch and then use it again when you do dispatch them and this would be where you did your bulk you know your daily let's say you've got 100 orders to go out um 95 of the time the simple case will be the one that you need to replicate which is i send all of the you know the items from this order um and that's going to be click here dispatch this one this one this one tap in my codes bam bam bam courier dpd and submit and that's going to create all the dispatches across all of those um orders for us and then we uh so let's go out of this and go back to the ones where we were sales orders um so this one we created a single dispatch we dispatched all of the products and of course that puts it into status fully dispatched okay so this this order is fully note that it's not invoiced because we never invoiced it we could invoice it let's do that so um again depending on how your business works uh there you know you can fit this into your workflow in different ways it's not step by step and it's not right it doesn't have to be it's the cycle but it can actually go in it can overlap in multiple directions quite an interesting way to see that like the default pack uh websites web store setup is that uh they would flow in an invoice state of course because that makes sense because most most web store orders are going to be invoiced they're going to be paid sorry so it makes sense for them to come through invoiced um because what we don't we don't have like a separate type of sales order for a cash sale you know some systems do that they have like an invoice cell and a cash cell we prefer to just simplify it um and it makes it just makes it easier to reason about so um if we what were we going to show uh we were going to invoice so we can just click here to invoice it and we'll invoice it today's date confirm and and now it's invoice and that shows again but just to repeat all that did was set the date there you can do that from here sales orders pending invoice you can bulk invoice here oh we talked about that already okay so let's go back to that sales order um so now we've got a committed invoice dispatched order so like three out of four um ready to roll is the payment right so we basically just covered uh invoiced status here and again the simple rule to remember you select a date you made it invoiced okay you can do it bulk like it it uh talks about here we've talked about the dispatch logic um automatic dispatching and the final thing is the payments so like everything in the pack admin panel you can create automatic manual payments here so edit add a new payment so it's 65.45 so let's say that i don't know the customer had sent you a bank transfer or something old-fashioned like that you would um you'd collect you'd put in here cb transfer let's say it came in uh yesterday and it came in for uh i don't know let's say the customer made a mistake and he sent me 65 pounds flat you know straight um so what's happened now the total of the order is 65 45. and the customer made a mistake and they sent you uh an in a transaction sorry a bank uh transfer for 65 pounds so you you the order's in in one of these annoying states now it happens in real life you know um so it's partially paid you can see that in the top in the top left corner so that represents reality you've got a single payment logged and a 45 cent outstanding balance note that one thing is the order balance yep and one thing is the customer balance right so um in this case this just just applies to this order if i go to the actual customer which is me um perhaps yeah you see the there's i've actually got an outstanding 843 from all the different test transactions that we've put through so um the this is useful to see what's owing from this particular order yeah exactly and then as well as doing that there's this payment button here as well this would again it's very similar to what i just did manually um it just makes it a little bit easier especially let's say he calls up and pays the last 45 cents by credit card credit card 45 cents it's pre-filled it with the amount yeah so i just click confirm and now i've got another um i've got a credit card but obviously all the usual metadata that you get from a credit card payment is not in there because this is a manual uh one and now it's fully paid right the order's fully paid no outstanding balance um normally you would do this uh well a lot especially if they're web store orders then a lot of them are going to come through paid already with all the metadata that comes from stripe or paypal or depending on how you've taken the payment right all that will be filled out otherwise if you wanted to do it bulk by hand if you had a lot of wholesale customers and you needed to register uh bulk um bank payments for example you could go to sales orders pending payment let's select payment for bulk processing and then we're just going to do all the bank transfers for example so we'll click see the transfer everything gets pre-filled with the remaining balance which is logically the most common workflow here so let's say we just wanted to do this one this one this one and this one um four of them and a separate transfer and we would click submit and it would um it would pay them and then they'd all be completed payment competitors and that pretty much that's the end of the workflow that's really clear yeah really clear thank you very much cool all right if you uh if you're watching this and you need any more uh information you're probably going to find it in the written document the written tutorial if not just get in contact with us and we'll help you out yeah definitely check out really helpful thanks a lot bye