Sales Order

Because "we agreed to supply this" and "we supplied this" are different facts, and a business that cannot separate them cannot tell what it owes its customers.

The sales order is the promise, and the order book is the sum of promises outstanding. It is what production plans against, what procurement buys against, and what a salesperson is really selling when they quote a delivery date. Its accuracy sets the ceiling on how trustworthy every downstream plan can be.

• A sales order commits inventory or capacity; confirming one you cannot fulfil is a promise, not a record.
• Delivered quantity may never silently exceed ordered quantity — over-delivery is a decision someone makes, not a default.
• A sales order creates no accounting entry. Revenue arrives with delivery and invoicing, not with the order.

Orders get confirmed against stock that is already promised to someone else. The system reports availability without netting off commitments, two orders claim the same units, and the failure surfaces at the loading bay rather than at the point of sale — where it would have cost nothing to catch.

• Partial delivery against a single order line, where the balance may or may not still be wanted by the time it is available.
• Price changing between order and delivery — whether the order price or the current price applies is a commercial policy, not a system default.
• Drop-ship orders, where stock never enters your warehouse and the delivery event is somebody else's.
• Service orders with no delivery event at all, where invoicing is the only confirmation the work happened.