Customers, quotes, sales orders, and getting product out the door.
Everyone you sell to lives on the Customers page. Each row shows the company, its main contact, how many quotes and orders it has, and the revenue it has brought in. Click New Customer to add one — only Company Name is required, but filling in the address and Payment Terms (for example Net 30) pays off later, because quotes and orders print those details automatically.
Open a customer and you will find a Contacts card. Add the real people you deal with — name, title, email, phone. One contact is marked Primary (the star button); the primary contact’s name, email, and phone become the customer’s main details everywhere else in the app. When you email a quote or order, you pick recipients from this contact list, so a customer with no contacts and no email cannot be emailed anything.
Customers are never deleted — the Archive button hides them from the pick lists on new quotes and orders while keeping all their history. A Reactivate button brings them back. Archived customers show a grey Archived badge in the list.
The edit page also gives you a small dashboard for that customer: total revenue, a monthly revenue chart, and their most recent quotes and orders, plus one-click buttons to start a New Quote already filled in with that customer. If you have a spreadsheet of customers to load in bulk, use the Import button (shown with the right permission) — see Importing data from a spreadsheet.
A quote is your formal price offer to a customer — nothing is reserved or built yet. Create one from Quotes: pick the customer, check the Valid Until date (it defaults to 30 days out), and click Create Quote & Add Lines. Quote numbers like QT-00001 are assigned automatically.
Each line is a finished good plus a quantity and unit price. The Add Line window has a searchable Browse picker and shows the part’s unit cost next to your price, with a margin badge so you can see instantly if you are quoting below cost. Set a Target Margin percentage and the app suggests a price with a Use $… button. A live badge on the cost means it is computed on the fly rather than locked in Part Costing. Lines also show an estimated production time when the part has an hours-per-unit rate.
Quotes move through statuses: Draft → Sent → Approved, Rejected, or Expired. Lines can only be edited while the quote is a Draft — that is deliberate, so the version the customer saw cannot quietly change. Rejected and expired quotes can go Back to Draft for rework. Emailing a draft quote marks it Sent for you.
When the customer says yes, mark it Approved and the Convert to Order button appears. Converting copies every line into a new sales order, links the two documents, and sets the quote’s status to Converted. From there, continue in Sales orders — from confirmation to shipment.
The list page highlights sent quotes that are past their valid-until date, so stale offers do not linger unnoticed.
A sales order is the real commitment: the customer wants these goods by this date. Orders are usually created by converting an approved quote, but you can also start one directly on Sales Orders. Record the customer’s own Customer PO # here — it prints on the confirmation so their accounting can match it up. The Ship To address fills itself from the customer record if you leave it blank.
Orders move through Pending → Confirmed → In Production → Shipped → Completed, with Cancelled available along the way. Lines can only be added or repriced while the order is Pending. Clicking Confirm Order first runs a Deadline Feasibility Check: using each part’s production rate, it estimates a completion date and warns you — with a Confirm Anyway (Deadline Risk) option — if the requested date cannot be met.
Every order shows an Order Readiness card with eight steps: Customer with an email, Line items added, Everything priced, No line below cost, Order confirmed, Production planned, Fully allocated, and Shipped. Click an unfinished step and the page takes you straight to the fix. The same progress bar appears on the order list, so you can spot stuck orders at a glance.
On a confirmed order, Generate Work Orders opens a Stock Availability Check. If unreserved stock already covers a line you can Allocate Available Stock instead of building more; whatever is short becomes WO- production orders, and the order moves to In Production. Linked work orders stay visible on the order with their progress. Shipping is its own step — see Allocating stock and shipping an order.
Allocation is the app’s way of putting a customer’s name on stock. When finished goods are allocated to an order line they are counted as reserved — still on the shelf, but no longer available to promise to anyone else. Stock gets allocated two ways: the Allocate Available Stock button (offered in the stock check and ship check windows), or automatically as linked work orders complete production.
Clicking Ship Order never ships blindly. It opens a Ship Readiness Check that compares ordered vs allocated quantity on every line. Lines short of stock are flagged Short with the missing amount; if unreserved stock exists you can allocate it right there and re-check. Only when every line shows Ready does the Confirm Ship button appear.
Confirming the ship is the moment inventory really moves: each line’s on-hand and reserved quantities drop by the allocated amount, the shipped quantity is recorded, and a shipment entry is written to the Transaction Log carrying the lot and heat numbers from production — your traceability record. After shipping, mark the order Completed once paperwork is done.
If your shop stores finished goods inside the inventory system, the Sales-order ship mode setting in Finished Goods settings can be switched from Counter (decrement on hand) to IMS pick (generate pick tickets) — then shipping also creates a pick ticket so the goods get pulled from where they are stored. See Sending finished goods into inventory (IMS).
Cancelling an order releases its allocations, so reserved stock goes back to being available for other orders.
Quotes and sales orders can be handed to the customer three ways, all from the buttons at the top of the document: Print opens a print-ready page, PDF downloads the document, and Email sends it as a PDF attachment. The layout uses your company name, logo, address, and document colors from Company Info.
Each quote and order has an Email Recipients card listing the customer’s contacts. Tick the people who should get this document and click Save Recipients — the Email button then shows how many it will send to. Contacts without an email address are greyed out; if no contacts are selected the app falls back to the customer’s main email. If nothing has an address, the button reads No Email and the fix is to add contacts on the customer record — see Customers and their contacts.
Two niceties worth knowing: emailing a Draft quote automatically marks it Sent, and orders with work orders in progress get a Progress Report button that previews — then emails — a production status report with per-line progress bars. Orders also offer a CoC button for a Certificate of Conformance.
Sending requires working SMTP mail settings. If you see SMTP email settings not configured, set them up under Company → Email Configuration, or ask your administrator.
The Front Counter hub is the one-screen view of buying and selling: open purchase orders, open sales orders, quotes still waiting on an answer, active customers and suppliers, and recent finished-goods activity. Each tile links to the full list behind it.
The Needs attention strip is the part to check daily — it calls out quotes past their valid date, POs awaiting receipt, and draft quotes to send, so nothing sits forgotten. Below that, panels list your open purchase orders, open quotes, open sales orders, and the latest stock transactions; click any row to jump straight into that document.
The toolbar buttons (+ PO, + Quote, + Sales Order) start new paperwork in one click. If you spend your day at the counter, this page plus Quotes — pricing work before you commit and Sales orders — from confirmation to shipment covers most of what you need.
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