If you buy goods and sell them on, the paperwork starts long before the invoice. A customer places an order. You order from your supplier. Goods arrive. Goods go out. Somewhere in there, money changes hands.
This chapter covers that trading cycle — purchase orders, sales orders, delivery notes, price lists and credit control. It's on the Business plan and up, the same gate as stock. On Lite the menu links are still there; clicking one shows an upgrade panel instead of the screen.
The one rule: orders are promises, not entries
Read this bit twice, because everything else follows from it.
A purchase order, a sales order and a delivery note are commitments. They post nothing to your ledger and move no stock. They are your record of what somebody promised somebody else.
Stock and your books still move in exactly the two places they always did, and nowhere else:
- Stock comes in when you approve a supplier bill.
- Stock goes out when you issue an invoice.
So no matter how much order paperwork you run through, your Profit & Loss and your stock valuation only change at those two moments. Nothing about the accounting is special-cased for orders.
| Document | Posts to the ledger? | Moves stock? |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase order | No | No |
| Supplier bill — draft | No | No |
| Supplier bill — approved | Yes | Yes, in |
| Sales order | No | No |
| Delivery note | No | No |
| Invoice — draft | No | No |
| Invoice — issued | Yes | Yes, out |
One more thing that surprises people: a sales order reserves nothing. If a customer orders your last ten units, those units are not held back. Anyone else can still be invoiced for them. The order is a promise, and a promise doesn't ring-fence stock.
Buying: order, receive, bill
Purchases → Purchase orders.
Raise the order. Pick the supplier, the date you expect delivery, and the lines you're ordering — the same lines you'd put on a bill, including the item where it's a stock item. 360books numbers it PO-0001 and counts up from there, or you can type your own number. Nothing posts.
Send it. Click PDF on the order to download it on your company letterhead — your registration number, address and contact details at the top, the supplier's details below, and a line asking them to quote your order number back on their invoice. That last part is what makes receiving match up later. Email it to them as you would an invoice.
Receive it when the goods arrive. Click Receive, enter the supplier's invoice number and dates, and 360books builds a draft bill from the outstanding lines. Still nothing posted, still no stock moved.
Approve the bill. This is the moment that counts. Approving brings the stock in, sets your cost, and posts to the ledger — exactly as it does for a bill you typed by hand.
Short deliveries are normal. If only part of an order arrives, change the quantities on the Receive screen and take what actually came. The balance stays outstanding, the order sits at partial, and you receive the rest on the next delivery. Once every line is satisfied the order becomes received, and trying to receive it again is refused — you can't accidentally book the same delivery twice.
Still on order. The second tab on the Purchase orders screen answers "what have we got coming?" — every line ordered and not yet received, by supplier, with the expected date and what it's worth. Orders you've cancelled or closed drop off it.
Selling: order, deliver, invoice
Sales → Sales orders.
Take the order. Pick the customer, the date they need it by, and the lines. There's a field for their order number, so when they phone about "PO 45123" you can find it. 360books numbers the order SO-0001 upwards. Nothing posts, and nothing is reserved.
Confirm it in writing. Click Confirmation for an order confirmation on your letterhead, carrying their own order number and stating plainly that a tax invoice follows. It's worth sending: it's your record of what was agreed, at what price, before anyone starts arguing about it.
Deliver. Click Deliver and 360books produces a delivery note, numbered DN-0001 upwards. It's a picking slip for the warehouse and proof of delivery for the customer. It moves no stock and posts nothing. Sending fewer than ordered? Change the quantities and the balance stays outstanding.
Print the delivery note. A Print delivery note button appears the moment the note is created, because that's when you need it — it goes with the goods. On your letterhead, with a name, signature and date block for whoever receives the load.
The delivery note deliberately shows quantities only, no prices. It ends up with a driver and a receiving clerk, and neither of them needs to know what you paid or what your margin is. Prices live on the invoice.
Invoice. Click Invoice and 360books raises the invoice from the outstanding lines. Issuing that invoice is where the stock finally leaves and the cost of sales posts.
Delivering and invoicing are separate on purpose, and both can be partial. You might deliver in three loads and invoice once at month end, or invoice up front and deliver later. The order's status follows the invoicing: open until something is invoiced, partial while some of it is, and fulfilled once every line is fully invoiced.
Back-orders. The second tab shows what customers are still waiting for — ordered less invoiced, oldest required date first. Where the line is a stock item and you don't have enough on hand to fill it, the line is flagged short, so you know which back-orders are a delivery problem and which are a buying problem.
Back-orders are worked out from the documents every time you open the report, not stored in a field somewhere. That's deliberate: a stored figure drifts the first time somebody edits an invoice, and then nobody trusts the report.
Price lists
Wholesalers rarely charge everyone the same. Sales → Price lists lets you set different prices for different customers without keeping a second item list.
A list only names the exceptions. Create a list — "Trade", "Reseller", "Big Five" — and put on it only the items whose price differs. Any item not on the list simply falls back to its own selling price. A list with four items on it works perfectly well next to a catalogue of four hundred.
Put a customer on one list. Under Credit terms & pricing on the customer, choose their price list. A customer can be on one list at a time.
From then on, picking an item on that customer's invoice or quote fills in their price instead of the standard one, and the form tells you so — "This customer is on a price list — picking an item fills in their price, not the standard one." You can still type over it before you save. Change the customer on a half-typed invoice and the prices refresh.
Removing prices. Clearing an item's price on a list removes the override, and that item goes back to its own selling price. Deleting a whole list releases every customer on it back to normal prices — nobody is left pointing at a list that no longer exists.
Credit control
Selling on account means lending your customer money. These two settings, both under Credit terms & pricing on the customer, are how you decide how much.
- Credit limit — the most you're willing to be owed by that customer at any one time.
- On hold — a manual stop. "Don't supply this one until we've spoken."
A credit limit of 0 means "no limit set", not "no credit". This is the one to remember. Zero is what the field starts on, so if zero meant "no credit" then switching this on would freeze your entire debtors book overnight. Leave it at 0 for the customers you don't want to police, and set a real number for the ones you do.
The check happens when you ISSUE an invoice, not when you draft one. A draft commits nothing and can be deleted; issuing is the moment the customer actually owes you more money. The same check runs when you invoice a sales order.
What it measures is the total of issued, unpaid invoices — open and part-paid — plus what the new invoice would add. Drafts, quotes and orders don't count, because none of them are debt.
The paper behind the limit lives on the customer too: editing a customer shows an Attachments card for the signed credit application, personal suretyship, contracts and SLAs — the documents you'll stand on if the account ever goes to hand-over. Each can carry an expiry date, and a lapsed one is raised by the books review.
When you're over, you get a warning, not a wall. 360books stops and tells you the real numbers: what they owe now, what their limit is, and what this invoice adds. Invoicing a customer who's on hold gets its own message. When you're invoicing from a sales order, a Supply anyway button sits right there — click it and the invoice goes out anyway.
That's deliberate. Software doesn't know that the customer's finance director phoned this morning, or that this delivery is the one that gets the account paid. The owner decides; 360books makes sure the owner decides knowingly. What it won't do is let a limit be blown quietly.
Where each thing lives
| What you want | Where to go |
|---|---|
| Raise an order to a supplier | Purchases → Purchase orders |
| What's ordered and not yet delivered | Purchases → Purchase orders → Still on order |
| Record a customer's order | Sales → Sales orders |
| Picking slip / proof of delivery | Sales → Sales orders → Deliver |
| What customers are still waiting for | Sales → Sales orders → Back-orders |
| Different prices for different customers | Sales → Price lists |
| Credit limit, on-hold, price list | Sales → Customers → Credit terms & pricing |
What it doesn't do
- No stock reservation. An order doesn't hold stock for the customer who placed it.
- No goods-received note separate from the bill. Receiving a purchase order creates a draft bill; there's no third document in between.
- No supplier price lists. Price lists set what you charge customers, not what suppliers charge you.
- No approval workflow. Anyone who can raise an order can raise an order; there's no "manager must sign off above R10,000" step.
For the stock behind all of this — costing, adjustments, valuation and returns — see Items & stock.