Our company offers both upfront services (design, project management, etc.) and manufactures custom product. We require a deposit payment from our clients due to the custom nature of our work, and are typically receiving said deposit while a project is still a quote. The actual sales order will not happen until much later in the process (when ready for manufacturing of product to begin).
We are having problems associating/tying cash receipts to quotes - currently we’re just entering a cash receipt and referencing the quote number in the description field. Does anyone know of a way (out of the box or a customization we can have done) that will link a cash receipt to a quote? I found the quote does have a cash receipt card on the activity tab (out of the box), but I can’t figure out how to get anything to tie to the quote to show up here:
All the cards on the Activities tabs are forward-looking. Sales Orders, Shipments, Invoices, etc.
These are all populated after the fact so if you ever look at the quote record down the road, you can see a record of what the Quote is linked to… but this is all after the fact.
Typical flow is:
Quote - Sales Order - Shipment - Invoice - Payment
For the type of work you’re talking about, we generally add a line item to the quote for things like “Pre-Engineering” (for example). We’ll then create a sales order for ONLY that line item when we want to then invoice (via Advanced Billing). That way we can invoice that Pre-Engineering sales order/line item, and any Cash Receipts can be applied against that invoice number.
Doing it this way, we also have a sales order, which we then use to kick off a job, so our Engineers can charge their time and we can track costs.
Once we get an ACTUAL order for the final part(s), we either create a second sales order for the final part(s)… or, you can open the original sales order that was created for “Pre-Engineering” (in this example), go to line details and use “New Line from Quote” in the overflow menu and pull the quote line items into the same Sales Order. This keeps everything together on one order, if you wish.
At this point… like I said, you can look at the “Activities” on the quote form and see all the linked sales orders, invoices, payments, etc.
Thanks for the info on the activities tab items - that’s good to know so I stop chasing the idea that there’s some way to apply cash receipts to a quote directly. Your pre-engineering workflow/work-around is interesting. Giving it some thought on my end to see if we can incorporate something similar.
When you create the initial sales order for the pre-engineering line item, does your quote “close” and then you just re-open it to continue editing/adding other line items?
Yes, it does mark the quote as “won” and closes it. But it can be re-opened pretty easily. Or, if the quote portion was already complete, it can remain closed and you can still pull line items into a sales order from the sales order line detail overflow menu.
For our workflow, it isn’t really a big issue. Just adds a couple clicks if the user needs to reopen the quote to continue working with it.
