Sales orders and invoices are both potentially legal documents. Invoices are financial transactions while orders are not. Again, information-wise they can still be part of the same physical layout, but the order will not have the financial component.
I can't help wondering if the current Quotes/Order/Invoice model isn't slightly too few states for some business.
My model is: - Customer calls and gets quote - Customer calls back and places order- Customer either hands over CC details on the phone or enters them into the website
- Only once we have payment do we ship the order - Then we raise the invoice (possibly in the same step as the above)One of the steps which I find clumsy is that recording of payments taken against orders. For example it's fairly straightforward for the case of customer using a valid CC and the order immediately dispatches. But sometimes they give CC numbers which are declined and I need to keep the order hanging around to chase for several days until they get in touch again. Or else we get bank transfers / Cheques that we need to wait for, etc.
It's quite hard to follow the progress of orders which are really firm, but we are waiting on payment versus speculative quotes, etc. Also we may sometimes take payment, but ship a few days later (for various reasonable reasons) and again it's a case of tracking those orders effectively.
Quite easy now that we are only doing a few orders, but it gets very hard as the volume rises
Also there are a couple of severe bugs in the current implementation involving the code for shipping "Orders" before they are invoiced. If you do certain actions then the system starts to loose stock...
...Then lets introduce partial payments, partial shipping, partial refunds (or complete refunds), returned for RMA repairs, etc...
Any thoughts? Ed W