Customer Order Overview

How do I? | Customer Order Preferences

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The term customer order collectively refers to layaways, sales orders, and work orders, which are used to record planned sales of merchandise and/or services to your customers.

These versatile documents can be used for a variety of purposes, including:

- Layaway of in-stock items, paid for via a series of deposits

- Sales orders for out-of-stock merchandise

- Special orders of new or custom merchandise

- Customer quotes or estimates for merchandise and/or services

- Tracking of repairs, alterations, warranty work, or any other service.

Customer orders typically involve taking a deposit when the order is placed, optional additional deposits over a period of time, and ultimately final payment when the merchandise or service is recorded on a sales receipt.

The ordered items are deducted from inventory only after you record them on a sales receipt to fulfill the order. However, they are immediately reflected in your available quantities, so you can see at a glance if on-hand items are already promised to another customer. Point of Sale alerts you when you receive an item that is on an open customer order.

You can sell all the items on an order at one time, or partially "fill" the order by selling some of them as merchandise is received or services completed. When the sale is recorded, deposits previously taken are applied towards the final payment.

A permanent record of the order and sale is provided by the receipt(s) in sales history. Fulfilled customer orders can be safely deleted at your discretion.

In a multi-store configuration, each store creates and maintains its own customer orders. These order documents are exchanged between stores so that each store can view up-to-date available quantity information for all stores. However, customer orders created at one store cannot be viewed or filled at another store. The deposit and sales receipts created at remote stores to take deposits and fill customer orders are sent to Headquarters in the normal manner.

Note: The availability of customer tracking features can be controlled by your Features to Use preference settings.

Related Topics

Tips for using sales orders

Tips for using work orders

Customer order field descriptions

Customer order reports

Security rights for customer orders

How customer orders are sent to QuickBooks Desktop