Sales

You create a sales invoice or sales order to record your agreement with a customer to sell certain products on certain delivery and payment terms.

You must use sales orders if your sales process requires that you can ship parts of an order quantity, for example, because the full quantity is not available at once. If you sell items by delivering directly from your vendor to your customer, as a drop shipment, then you must also use sales orders. In all other aspects, sales orders work the same way as sales invoices. With sales orders, you can also use the Order Promising functionality to communicate certain delivery dates to your customers.

You can negotiate with the customer by first creating a sales quote, which you can convert to a sales invoice or sales order when you agree on the sale. After the customer has confirmed the agreement, you can send an order confirmation to record your obligation to deliver the products as agreed.

You can easily correct or cancel a posted sales invoice before it is paid. This is useful if you want to correct a typing mistake or if the customer requests a change early in the order process. If the posted sales invoice is paid, then you must create a sales credit memo or a sales return order to reverse the sale.

Good sales and marketing practices are all about how to make the best decisions at the right time. Marketing functionality in Business Central provides precise and timely overview of your contact information so that you can serve your prospective customers more efficiently and increase customer satisfaction. For more information, see Relationship Management.

If you use Dynamics 365 Sales for customer engagement, you can enjoy seamless integration in the lead-to-cash process by using Business Central for backend activities such as processing orders, managing inventory, and doing your finances. For more information, see Using Dynamics 365 Sales from Business Central.

In business environments where the customer must pay before products are delivered, such as in retail, you must wait for the receipt of payment before you deliver the products. In most cases, you process incoming payments some weeks after delivery by applying the payments to their related posted, unpaid sales invoices. For more information, see Reconcile Payments Using Automatic Application.

Sales documents can be sent as PDF files attached to email. The email body will contain an extract of the sales document, such as products, total amount, and a link to the PayPal site. For more information, see Send Documents by Email.

For all sales processes, you can incorporate an approval workflow, for example, to require that large sales to certain customers are approved by the accounting manager. For more information, see Using Workflows.

The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.

To See
Create a customer card for each customer that you sell to. Register New Customers
Create a sales quote where you offer products on negotiable terms before converting the quote to a sales invoice. Make Sales Quotes
Create a sales invoice to record your agreement with a customer to sell products on certain delivery and payment terms. Invoice Sales
Process a sales order that involves partial shipping or drop shipment. Sell Products
Understand what happens when you post sales documents. Posting Sales
Prepare to pick items for shipment. Print the Picking List
Set up standard sales or purchase lines that you can quickly insert on documents, for example, for recurring replenishment orders. Create Recurring Sales and Purchase Lines
Link a sales order to a purchase order to sell a drop-shipment item that will be delivered directly from your vendor to your customer. Make Drop Shipments
Have a catalog item shipped from a vendor to your warehouse so that you can ship the item on to your customer. Create Special Orders
Perform an action on an unpaid posted sales invoice to automatically create a credit memo and either cancel the sales invoice or recreate it so you can make corrections. Correct or Cancel Unpaid Sales Invoices
Create a sales credit memo to revert a specific posted sales invoice to reflect which products the customer returns and which payment amount you will refund. Process Sales Returns or Cancellations
Manage your customer's commitment to purchase large quantities delivered in several shipments over time. Work with Blanket Sales Orders
Sell assembly items that are not currently available by creating a linked assembly order to supply the full or partial sales order quantity. Sell Items Assembled to Order
Invoice a customer once for multiple shipments by combining the shipments on one invoice. Combine Shipments on a Single Invoice
Inform your customers of order delivery dates by calculating either the capable-to-promise date or the available-to-promise date. Calculate Order Promising Dates
Register your estimates for future sales, specified by item and by period, to function mainly as input to production planning. Create a Forecast
Resolve confusion when two or more records exist for the same customer. Merge Duplicate Records

See Also

Setting Up Sales
Register New Customers
Managing Receivables
Managing Payables
Project Management
Working with Business Central
General Business Functionality

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