Creating, Importing and Managing Sales Orders

Creating Sales Orders is one of the most exciting moments of your business!  This is where you will begin to see all the results of your hard work come together! Whether your customers call you, walk into your retail store or visit your Showroom/eCommerce store online, a Sales Order will be generated to show what items they want to buy from you.  

For walk-in orders, you will have to manually enter them into Uphance using the instructions in this document. However, for sales coming through your eCommerce store, you won't need to worry because they are handled automatically.

Sales created in Uphance start their existence in the DRAFT state (even those coming in from your eCommerce store).  And, you will have to "Confirm" the state before the sale is final.  In this state, you will add products to build your tentative customer order. 

To create a draft sale, fire up Order Management >> Sales Order, create a New Draft Sales, select the customer type and enter the customer's name.

If it is a new customer you don't have on the system yet, you can update the contact information on the next screen.

Additionally, you can select the season for the product they want to purchase from, specify the channel, and select the warehouse where you intend to fulfill the order. Bear in mind that all these are optional.

Next, add products to the sales you just created. If you are satisfied, confirm the order, hence changing its status from draft to confirmed.

Let's say you've created 100 orders as drafts and wish to confirm all of them in bulk. How would you do that? Or, perhaps, you imported a large number of orders from a spreadsheet, and they are still in draft mode.

To do so, select all the orders you wish to confirm in bulk, then click Actions >> Bulk Confirm:

Note: The bulk confirm can only work on draft orders with products and payment terms added to them. If you attempt to bulk confirm any order without those, it won't work.

Adding orders manually, one at a time, won't be practical if you have, say, 1,000 orders you need to upload.

Thankfully, Uphance enables you to import sales orders into your account, and there's no limit to the number of orders you can import.

To import orders, first download the order import spreadsheet template by clicking Sales Orders >> Actions >> Upload Sales Order. Click Sales to download the template.

It will look something like this:

Populate the sheet with your orders' information, save and upload by clicking Actions >> Upload Orders once again.

Note: For your orders to be uploaded correctly, first, you must add the products you wish to import, alongside the customers whom the orders are meant for to Uphance. Then ensure the product and customer names you enter in the sheet match what you've added to Uphance.

Once you've created a new draft sales order, the next step is to add products to it. Follow the steps illustrated below to add products manually.

If you wish to add the products via barcode scanning, simply click the scan toggle button to use a handheld scanner.

When you are done, you can proceed to confirm the order.

Uphance allows you to add attachments to your sales orders. This could be a PDF document, a spreadsheet, or an image.

The best way to go about this is to set up automatic attachments for your emails. You can learn how to do that here.

But if you prefer to do so manually, simply click the attachment icon on the Sales Order and upload the attachment.

If the attachment was uploaded successfully, you can easily access it by clicking the attachment icon again. You can either download or delete it.

There are times you just want to copy and duplicate a customer's order rather than create it from scratch.

This feature will also come in handy if you have a set of customers who order similar items each time they make a purchase. Using the order copy feature will save you the trouble of manually creating the orders each time they come in.

To use, first, locate the order you wish to copy. Next, click the Make a copy link.

The copied order will contain the same information as the original one. However, the order number will change.

All you have to do now is confirm the order and ship it to your customers.

Keep in mind that you can edit the product quantity in the order and even add new products if you wish. To edit product quantity, click on the pencil icon. To add new products, click the + icon:

The Sales Order list allows you to search for customer orders by customer name, customer "tag", order date or other filters.

To open sales orders, navigate to Order Management >> Sales Orders

You can sort orders based on Customer name, Season, Brand, Order number, Status, Order date, Start ship date, and Cancel ship date.

The sort feature is on a toggle meaning that if you click the column heading once it will sort ascending and if you click it again it will sort them descending. These are the fields that you can sort:

Use the Search feature to Filter your order list for a specific customer name or sales order number. You can also search using order tags.

Use filtering to search for your order based on any number of these attributes: Seasons, sales status, channels, agents, brands, source of order (manual, Shopify, etc.), order and ship date, payment terms, and originating warehouse.

The "All Seasons" drop down menu allows filtering of Sales Orders by a particular Sales Order's Season. These are "Sales Order" seasons not "Product" seasons, as you may have a Sales Order with products from multiple Product Seasons on one Sales Order. The Sales Order Season is the Season listed at the top of the Sales Order as shown in the Blue box below.

Note: if your Sales Order is in the wrong season, you can change that by clicking on that Sales Order Season and selecting a different one.

The "All Sales" drop-down menu allows filtering of Sales by multiple options. The default is "All Sales". However, if you click on the drop-down menu, you will see the additional options as illustrated in the image below.

The benefit of using these filters is that you will be able to gain additional insight into the status of your orders which may help you make business decisions on the next steps to move them forward through the process.

For example, you may want to use the Not Yet Invoices filter to get a list of Sales Orders that you need to create invoices for, or the Awaiting Shipment filter for orders that haven't been shipped yet. You may want to use the Awaiting Payment filter to see the sales orders that have not been paid for.

The Unconfirmed Sales may be a reminder to complete a task (e.g. call the customer for a billing or shipping address) so that you can Confirm the order.

The Confirmed & Open may be a reminder to follow up on a Production Order for fulfilment.

The Season, Sales and Agents filters allow you to select one item from each of the menu options. However, the All Channels drop-down menu allows you to select multiple pricing Channels. Select your intended channel by clicking the checkbox next to it. Keep in mind that you can select multiple channels at once.

There are times when you want to reserve stock for a customer's order by holding the order temporarily to fulfil it at a later time. In such an instance, the stock needed for the order would be held down, but wouldn't be shipped until the order is released.

You can do that now, thanks to the newly added order hold feature. Once you hold an order, the pick ticket you create for it will have a "Draft" status, which means you won't be able to pack and ship the order.

To undo the hold, you would have to release the order and change the pick ticket status to "Confirmed".

Do you wish to add a tax rate to a sales order? First, you'd have to specify the tax rate by navigating to Settings >> Invoicing >> Tax rates. Add your desired tax rate and select the type. Once you've added it, create an order or open an existing one and add the tax rate as demonstrated below:

You can delete a draft or confirmed sales order at any time. To delete a draft sales order, simply open it, scroll to the bottom, click the delete button and enter a reason for deleting the order.

To delete a confirmed order, the process is pretty much the same, with a little twist. This time around, you will have to delete all documents tied to that order (pick tickets, invoices, etc.) before you can delete it.

You may want to see all Sales Orders for a particular Stylist. Use the All Stylist drop-down menu to select the stylist you want to filter for.

Uphance allows you to change seasons for your orders even after confirming them. To change the season for an order, navigate to Order Management >> Sales Orders.

Locate the sales order you would like to update and change the season like so:

You can also see the Sales History for a particular customer by bringing up your customer's profile Customer Relationship >> Customers. Scroll down a bit to the Sales History section. There, you will see all the customer's orders. Click on the Order number to bring up that particular order.

You can easily add customer notes/instructions to sales orders.

After adding the note, it will appear like this when you generate and download an Order Confirmation document:

But if, for some reason, the customer note isn't showing on your OC document, you can manually add it via the document designer.

To do so, open the document designer, click Order Confirmation, and edit the active template, followed by Order Confirmation again. This will launch the document designer interface. Add the Text component to where you want to display the customer note.

Next, change the merge tag of the text to Customer notes. Finally, add a heading to the customer note (optional). You can do this by duplicating an existing heading, altering the text to what you want or by adding a new heading.

Besides adding notes, you can also add shipping instructions to your sales orders. You can do so in two steps:

Step One: Input the instruction

Open an order (or create a new one) and then input the shipping instructions like so:

Step Two: Display the instructions

After inputting the shipping instructions, the next thing you will want to do is to add it to the document where you want the instructions displayed.

For example, you may want it displayed on your Order Confirmation (OC), Pick Ticket, Delivery Notes, etc. Let's say you want to show it in your order confirmation documents.

To do so, fire up the Document Designer, select the document you are after (order confirmation in this instance) and edit the active template (you will know it's active if it has a dark grey overlay). Alternatively, duplicate the Standard Template and activate it. Then start editing the OC template.

Locate where you want to add the shipping instructions. Add a subheading (optional), and then some text.

Next, change the Merge Tags of the text to Shipment Instruction. Save.

The next time you add a shipping instruction to an order and download the OC, you will see the instructions like so:

If you want to see all the orders picked or packed but haven't been shipped yet, navigate to Reports >> Inventory Reports >> Remaining to Ship. Select the warehouse you wish to run the report (or just pick all warehouses). You can also set other filter variables, such as customer, sales channel, agents, etc.

Finally, set a date range and run the report.

Sales orders in Uphance can have one of these three statuses: Draft, Confirmed, or Complete.

If it is in a Draft state, it means the order has some or all of the required information, including customer information, but hasn't been confirmed yet.

Confirmed means the ordered products are ready for fulfilment and an invoice has been created for the order.

Once the order is paid for, shipped and received by the customer, it's completed.

You can easily check the status of an order by navigating to Order Management >> Sales Orders. You can search using the order number or the customer the order was for.

There are times when you wish to add extra products to an order, even though you've already confirmed it and picked some items in the order already.

For example, let's say you had an order for 5 winter jackets. Two weeks ago, you picked and shipped 3 jackets, now you are left with 2. Then the customer calls and requests an extra 4 pieces of jackets, in addition to 3 pieces of sweatpants for the same order. How do you handle that?

The easiest way to handle this is by creating a balanced order. Put simply, balance orders are orders that account for unpicked items in an original sales order. The best part is that you can add extra items to a balance order.

When you create a balance order, Uphance will first create a cancellation for the unpicked items and then move them into the balance order.

To create one, first, open an order with unpicked items. Then hit the Create button, and generate the balance order. Next, add more items to the order (though optional).

The balance order will appear on your list of sales orders. Be sure to note the order number. You can create pick tickets and shipment for the order, just the same way you would for regular orders.

Uphance handles exchange rates for sales orders automatically, especially if the order is in a currency different from your home base currency.

For instance, if your home base currency is USD and you get an order in EUR, Uphance will automatically convert the EUR to USD based on current market values once you confirm the order. But you can always manually input your exchange rates if you so desire.

Uphance offers a wide variety of reporting capabilities that give you deep insights into your sales operations, giving you better control over your business.

One such report is the Sales Order Report. This report lets you see your sales by SKU, product, customer, variation, country, size, to name a few.

To access your sales report, click the Reports tab. Then select the report you would like to run. Set your parameters using the filters and click the Run button.

Interestingly, you can download the report as CSV/Excel. To do so, simply navigate to the bottom of the page and select the format you would like to download the report.

If you wish to download all your sales orders as a PDF in one click, click on the PDF button and download in bulk. Next, select the season, channel, set start and end dates and then click the join each document type into a single PDF file checkbox to compile all the orders in one file.

Finally, click the create archive button. Once you do, the system will generate links to the download files, which will also be sent to your inbox once the download link has been generated.

Sales Order Current State Status reports show you which Sales Orders are unconfirmed, confirmed and open, not yet invoiced, awaiting shipment, awaiting payment, fully shipped, consigned, completed and cancelled. These reports are available by Season, Channel or Agent. And, they can be broken down even further.

To see the statuses of your sales orders, open Sales Orders and then pick the status you want to filter for from the All Sales dropdown:

In addition, you can use the additional filters to narrow down your reporting criteria by Season, Channel, Companies, Brands, etc.

Once you have your list filtered the way you want, you are ready to download the report. You can download it as a PDF, Excel, or CSV. To download as PDF, click the PDFs button.

To download as CSV or Excel, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click your preferred download option.

When creating returns, credit notes or cancellations for a Shopify order, you can choose to send refunds directly to Shopify to avoid creating duplicates.

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