Quotations & Sales Orders

A quotation offers work at a price. A sales order confirms the customer accepted it. Neither books revenue: nothing reaches your ledger until the document becomes an invoice (a deposit recorded on an order is the one exception, see below). That is the point of them — you can quote freely without touching your books.

Both screens work like the sales invoice: you build the document on the left while the finished PDF renders live on the right, so what you send is exactly what you see. Open Orders & Quotations → Postings → Quotation or Sales Order (each has its own permission).

The chain#

Quotation → Sales Order → Sales Invoice, and a quotation can also go straight to an invoice when there is no order step worth keeping. You can enter any of the three directly; the chain is there when you want it, never compulsory.

• Convert to Order appears on a saved quotation. It copies everything into a new sales order, gives it a fresh order number from your number sequence, and closes the quotation.
• Create Invoice appears on a saved quotation and on a saved order. It opens the sales invoice screen filled in from that document — customer, currency, line items, notes. Nothing is booked yet. Check the account, due date and payment method, then post as usual. Once the invoice is posted, the source document closes and records which invoice it became.

Because the invoice is only prefilled, you are free to change quantities or prices before posting: the quotation is an offer, the order is a plan, the invoice is the fact.

You can also convert from the report without opening the document — tick the rows and use the button above the list. See Finding them again.

You only see an action you have the rights for. A site that works quotation → invoice and keeps orders out of its roles simply never sees Convert to Order.

Where the invoice came from#

An invoice raised this way records its origin in its own History tab: Created from quotation … followed by the quotation number. Worth knowing because an order number is stored on the invoice itself, whereas a quotation number is not — the history entry is the only trace on the invoice side, and the audit trail is where you go looking for it.

Deposits taken on an order#

A payment recorded on an order is booked when you save the order — it posts as a prepayment against the customer. It is therefore not copied onto the invoice: doing so would book the same money twice. Settle the deposit against the invoice the way you normally would.

Building the document#

You need a customer first. Everything else can be created as you go.

Header. Pick the customer and the Quotation Date or Order Date. The Quotation Number / Order Number is drawn from your number sequence when you leave it empty — see Number sequences. Valid Until on a quotation tells the customer how long the price holds; on an order the same field is the Required By delivery date. Both print on the document. A Description and, where departments exist, a Department complete the header; a collapsible Shipping panel takes Shipping Point, Ship Via and Way Bill. Currency follows the customer’s currency (your dataset currency otherwise); picking a foreign one reveals the exchange rate.

Items. Each line takes a service from your catalogue (Number), its Description, Qty, Unit, Price and an optional discount (%); Extended shows the line total. Picking a service fills its description, unit and price from the catalogue — all of which you can overwrite for this document only. The arrow at the end of a line opens the details: Project, Delivery Date, Item Notes, Serial No., Order Number, PO Number, Packaging, Vendor, Cost and the weights. Drag the handle to reorder lines; the document redraws as you go.

Totals and notes. VAT follows the tax accounts on each item. Tax Included switches the line prices between net and gross. Notes print on the document; Internal Notes never leave neoo.

Payments are available on orders — a deposit taken before the work is invoiced. Note that saving an order with a payment books that payment straight away as a prepayment; it is not a note-to-self.

Sending it#

Print opens the rendered PDF; the download and open-in-new-tab icons sit in the preview toolbar. Email opens the send dialog with the customer’s address and your default message already filled in, the document attached as a PDF, and the finished page shown alongside so you can check what you are about to send before you send it.

Both are held back while you have unsaved edits (“Save your changes to print or email this document.”) — the server renders the saved document, so it would otherwise send something other than what is on screen. Save first and they light up.

Set the default message text under System → Messages (Default Email Messages), where Quotation and Order each have their own template per language.

Layout and wording#

Edit layout (the sliders icon in the preview toolbar) opens the same live editor your invoices use — see Invoice Layout & Wording. Opened from a quotation it offers the quotation template only, and from an order the order template only, so there is no risk of editing your invoice wording by accident. The frame — letterhead, logo, margins, fonts — is shared with every document your company sends; the introduction and closing text belong to the document you opened it from.

Finding them again#

Orders & Quotations → Reports → Quotation Reports and Sales Order Reports open on the work that is still live: your open documents are listed straight away, without pressing Search. Closed ones are one checkbox away under Filters.

Search across everything on screen with the search box, or open Filters for customer, number, date range, description and shipping fields. Columns picks which columns to show — drag a row by its handle to reorder, use the toggle to show or hide it, and Reset returns to the standard set. Your choice is remembered per report.

Tick the checkbox on one or more rows and a bar appears above the list with the conversions that apply to this report — Convert to Order on quotations, Create Invoice on both. Only the actions you have rights for are shown.

Convert to Order works on any number of rows at once: each quotation becomes its own order, and the ones that succeed are reported together. Already-closed documents in your selection are skipped rather than blocking the batch.

Create Invoice takes one document at a time. Each invoice is checked and posted individually — the account, due date and payment method are decisions worth making per invoice — so the button waits until exactly one row is ticked.

Clicking a document number opens it.

On a phone the same selection works from a checkbox on each row, with the count and the action in a bar pinned to the bottom of the screen; tapping a row opens the document detail.