What Is a Sales Order?

Microsoft's documentation for its Business Central ERP describes creating a sales order as recording your agreement with a customer to sell or trade products under specific terms. Its sales order includes:

• Header: you enter the customer, and other fields on the order are filled in with information about that customer.
• Lines: each line holds an item or service and a quantity, and the line amount is the unit price multiplied by the quantity, less any line discount.
• Customer's reference: an external document number records the number the customer assigned to the order, so the posted documents can be found by the buyer's own number.

In Business Central, when products are delivered, fully or partially, the sales order is posted as shipped, or as shipped and invoiced. Posting a sales order creates a shipment and an invoice, and you cannot create an invoice from the Sales Orders page for something that has not shipped. If only part of an order can ship, because the full quantity isn't available right away, Business Central says the sale must be processed as a sales order. In a partial shipment, for example, from an order for 100 units, you ship 40 units now and 60 later, and there is no limit on the number of shipments for an order.

The three documents describe the same sale from different seats:

• Purchase order: the buyer's document. Shopify defines a purchase order as a list of the products, prices and quantities for an order that a business places with a supplier.
• Sales order: the seller's document, recording the sale it agreed to under specific terms. One sales order can ship in several partial shipments.
• Invoice: the bill for what shipped. In Business Central, posting the sales order as invoiced creates it, and you can invoice only part of the shipped quantity if you choose.

In short, the purchase order comes from the buyer, and the sales order and the invoice come from the seller.

A distributor receives purchase order 5520 from a contractor for 120 boxes of screws at $9 a box, so the order totals 120 x $9 = $1,080.

The distributor enters sales order 1043, with PO 5520 as the external document number. Only 80 boxes are in stock, so it ships and invoices 80: 80 x $9 = $720. The other 40 boxes stay open on the sales order. When they arrive, the distributor ships them and invoices 40 x $9 = $360. The two invoices add up to the $1,080 on the purchase order, and both quote PO 5520.

Shopify calls the record an order. A B2B order is an order processed through a blended or dedicated store, associated with a company and a B2B customer. Two ways B2B orders reach Shopify:

• Online checkout. B2B customers check out on their company location's payment terms and can add purchase order numbers. You can set a company location to submit every order as a draft for your review. No payment is collected at checkout, and payment is due when you confirm the order.
• Draft orders. For orders that customers send by phone or email instead of through your online store, staff create draft orders, with company pricing, payment terms and an optional PO number. When a payment is captured partially or fully on a draft order, it is automatically converted to an order.

Shopify B2B runs on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. Shopify says you can integrate your ERP systems, accounting systems or other business systems with your B2B store, or build your own integrations using B2B APIs.

Uncap builds Shopify ERP integrations: a real-time, two-way connection between your Shopify store and your ERP, so orders, inventory, customers and pricing stay in sync across both systems instead of being retyped by hand.

• Purchase order
• Order to cash
• Backorder
• Order management system
• Procure-to-pay
• Packing slip

• Microsoft Learn: Create a customer sales order and sell products (Business Central)
• Shopify Help Center: B2B terminology
• Shopify Help Center: Creating B2B orders using draft orders