Open ERP Book (Sales and Purchasing)

Sales and Purchasing

These two chapters are about selling and purchasing products and services.

Management of Sales

This chapter describes Open ERP’s sales management, following the complete sales order process from quotation to customer order, including the management of deliveries and of invoicing. It doesn’t look at customer relations and pre-sales, which are handled by the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) modules described in an earlier part of the book.

It also describes the management of carriers, margin control and reporting, and price management and the handling of various types of sales discount campaign.

For this chapter you should start with a fresh database that includes demonstration data, with sale and its dependencies installed and no particular chart of accounts configured.

Sales Quotations

In Open ERP a quotation and an order are handled by the same underlying object, but in different states. You can consider an order to be a quotation that has evolved because it has been confirmed by the customer. Or, conversely, that a quotation is an order that hasn’t yet been validated or cancelled. All of the orders and quotations in the system can be reached using the menu Sales Management ‣ Orders.

Entering Quotation details

To enter details of a new quotations you can use the menu Sales Management ‣ Orders ‣ New Quotation. Open ERP then opens a new window so that you can enter data into new blank quotation form.

(Pic) Data entry for a new quotation

Some information is automatically completed by the system:

an internal reference for the quotation or order,

the sale point that the order will be delivered from,

the order date.

You can modify any of that information before validating the quotation. The customer reference is shown in the header of the order. This optional field if for the customer’s own reference number – if the customer doesn’t supply one then just leave it empty.

You then enter all the data about the order in the Sale Order tab. Start by entering the customer name, selecting the correct customer from the list of customers in the system. You can create a new customer on the fly at this stage if necessary – press <F1> in the empty Customer field to do that.

Once the customer name has been selected, different fields of the order become completed automatically, based on the configuration of the partner form for that customer:

Order Address : person handling the order at the customer. By default, Open ERP proposes the Contact Address at the selected partner.

Delivery Address : address used on the delivery order. By default, Open ERP proposes the Delivery address from the partner form. If nothing is defined in that slot, it uses the default address instead.

Invoice Address : address used to send the invoice to the customer. By default, Open ERP proposes the address labelled Invoice from the partner form. If nothing is defined there, it uses the default address instead.

Price List : will determine both the currency of the quotation and the price that will be used for each product.

Payment Conditions : shows the payment method that the customer will follow, for example 50% on order, 50% on delivery .

Delivery Method : for example Post – Express Mail .

You can modify any of these fields on the order as you go.

You can also set an analytic account for your order. This account will be used during invoicing to generate accounting entries corresponding to the invoice automatically. This is extremely useful for assigning revenues to the project or case specified by this order.

Tip: Analytic Accounts

If you’re managing by task, the analytic account to be selected is the one that corresponds to the project for the order. The sale carried out by the order can be allocated to the project so that profitability calculations can be made.

Once the information has been entered, you can enter data for the order lines. To do that, create a new order line as shown in the figure Entering a new customer order line:

(Pic) Entering a new customer order line

First of all select the product that is to be sold to the customer. Open ERP shows some useful information in the list of products to help you during your sale:

Real stock : physically present in your warehouses. This value depends on the sale point selected in the order header. Different sale points can be linked to different warehouses, giving different stock levels, or can use the same warehouse.

Virtual stock : shows a salesperson the quantity that can be sold, taking into account both stock reserved for other orders and amounts that could arrive in the short term.

Customer Price : (May not be shown, depending on the installed modules). depends on the conditions attached to the customer, calculated on the list price. This is the price that’s proposed by default in the customer quotation, unless it’s been modified by the salesperson.

List Price : the base sale price for the given product. It provides a base for the salesperson to be able to judge whether to offer a discount to the customer, and how much any discount should be.

Cost Price : shows the cost price of the product. If the salesperson sells at less than this amount, then the company loses money.

(Pic) Selecting a product in a Sales Order

When the product that’s to be sold to the customer has been selected, Open ERP automatically completes all the other required fields: price, unit of measure, description, discount, lead times, applicable taxes, default packaging and the product description. All of this information comes from the product form.

Tip: Visible Discount

If a discounted price is taken from a price list then by default that figure is shown as the sale price to the customer. He’ll see a discount of 0% along with unit price that is different from the list price. If you install the module product_visible_discount from addons-extra you can configure whether you want to make the discount explicitly visible on an order form as a percentage difference from the list price, or just show a reduced unit price as it does by default.

In the form, the selected product is presented in the language of the user so that he can see what he’s selling. The description of the product sold can also be expressed in the customer’s language. The translation to the customer’s language is used on the quotation or order when it’s printed.

(Pic) Sale of a product in a partner language that differs from the user language

Note: One-off Sales

If a product’s only sold to a customer once, you don’t have to enter data into a complete new product form just for that sale. You can manually complete all the information in the order without putting it into a product: description, price, quantity, lead time, taxes. In this case Open ERP won’t generate a delivery note because the product isn’t held in stock.

When all of the products are entered, you can print the quotation and send it to the customer. To do this, click on the report Quotation / Order in the REPORTS links to the right. Open ERP opens the quotation in PDF to enable to you to see it before printing.

(Pic) Printing a customer quotation

You can then confirm the quotation to move it on to an order if the order is confirmed by the customer, or just cancel the window without confirming the order to leave it in quotation state. To find all of the current quotations, you can use the menu Sales Management ‣ Orders ‣ My Orders ‣ My Quotations.

To follow the process for your order, you can click on the process view from the order form. Open ERP shows you an interactive process view of that order. For more information about its use, look at Process.

(Pic) Process view from following a customer order

Management of Packaging

Products can be managed in several different packaged forms. For example if you sell batteries you can define the following packages for a given battery product:

by Piece: a battery

Blister pack: a pack of 4 batteries

Pack of 100 blisters: 400 batteries

Palette, containing 40 packs for a total of 16,000 batteries.

Open ERP’s packaging management enables you to sell the same product in several different forms. The salesperson could sell, separately, one battery or a palette of batteries. In the order, you can select the default packaging type as a function of the quantities ordered.

For example, if the customer wants to buy 30,000 batteries, the salesperson can select the package palette . Open ERP will then propose the sale of 32,000 batteries, which corresponds to two palettes. Or the salesperson can select 75 packs.

The available packages are defined in the product form, in the Packaging tab. The first item on the list is the one that will be used by default.

Once a package has been defined on the order, Open ERP will throw up an alert if the ordered quantities don’t correspond to the proposed packages. The quantity must be a multiple of the field Quantity by Package defined on the packaging form.

(Pic) Alert on the quantities sold compared with the packaging

Don’t confuse the management of packaging with the management of multiple units of measure. The Units of Measure are used to manage the stock differently in its different units. With packages, the stock is always managed by individual item but information about the package to use is supplied to the storesperson along with that item.

Even if the effects are the same, the printed documents will be different. The two following operations have the same effect on stock movement levels but will be printed differently on the sales order and the packing order:

32,000 batteries, delivered on two palettes,

2 palettes of batteries, with no information about packaging.

If the customer wants to order a palette and 10 packs, the salesperson can put two order lines on the sales order using the same product but different units of measure.

Example Packing and different products

It’s sometimes more useful to define different products than to define several possible packages for the same product. A case of beer in a supermarket is a good example. A case holds 24 bottles, plus the empty case itself. The customer can buy bottles by the piece or a case of 24 bottles at one go.

You could define two packages for the product Bottle of beer : PCE and case . But this representation doesn’t let you manage the stock and price of empty cases. So you might instead prefer a Bill of Materials for the sale, defining and using three different products:

the empty case for the beer,

the bottle of beer,

the case of 24 bottles of beer.

You also define the bill of materials below which determines the make-up of the case of 24 beers:

Case of 24 bottles of beer: 1 unit,

Bottle of beer: 24 units,

Empty case of beer: 1 unit.

Each of these three products has a different price. The products Bottle of beer and Empty case of beer have a stock level that needs to be managed. The Case of 24 bottles of beer has no stock because, if you sell the product, Open ERP automatically moves the stock in two lines, one for the empty case and the other for the 24 individual bottles of beer. For more information on bills of material for sale, see chapter Manufacturing.

Management of Alerts

To manage alerts on products or partners, you can install the warning module. Once that is installed, you will be able to configure a series of alerts on the partners or products by setting parameters in the new Warnings tab on each of the forms.

(Pic) Management of alerts on partners

(Pic) Management of alerts on products

You can activate alerts for a series of events. For each alert you should enter a message that will be attached to the person setting off the event. The different available events on the partner form are:

Entering a customer order for the partner,

Entering a supplier order for the partner,

Sending a delivery to the partner (or receiving an item),

Invoicing a partner.

The alerts that can be configured on a product form are:

The sale of that product,

The purchase of that product.

For example, if you enter an alert for the invoicing of a customer, for an accountant entering an invoice for that customer, the alert message will be attached as shown in the figure Alert from invoicing a customer:

(Pic) Alert from invoicing a customer

Control of deliveries and invoicing

Configuration of orders

Depending on the configuration of the order, several different possible consequences can follow. Three fields determine the future behaviour of an order:

Packing Policy : Partial Delivery or Complete Delivery,

Shipping Policy : Shipping & Manual Invoice, Payment Before Delivery, Invoice on Order After Delivery, and Invoice from the Packing,

Invoice on : Ordered Quantities or Delivered Quantities.

Tip: Simplified view

If you work in the Simplified View mode, only the Shipping Policy field is visible in the second tab on the order. To get to the Extended View mode, assign the group Usability – Extended View to the current user.

Packing mode

The packing mode determines the way that the storesperson will do the packing. If the order is put into Partial Delivery mode, the packing order will appear in the list of things for the storesperson to do as soon as any of the products on the order is available. To get the list of items to be done you can use the menu Stock Management ‣ Outgoing Products ‣ Available Packing.