Create an order

An order is how a customer’s commitment lands as a live record in the platform. Open the order, build its line-up of styles, colorways, sizes, quantities, and unit prices, and drive it through the work-phase spine toward shipment.

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What this workflow achieves

You end this workflow with a confirmed order that is progressing toward shipment — a single record carrying the styles the customer bought, the colorways and sizes per style, the per-piece prices, the commercial currency and trade terms, and the ship date the rest of the business is planning against. From here:

• the order’s styles carry their own pin onto the BOM, cost sheet, and MO versions the order is working from,
• a manufacturing order (MO) can be issued against the order’s pinned versions when production is ready to begin,
• factory orders, purchase orders, shipments, invoices, and customer payments all read the order as their anchor, and
• the readiness view tracks what inside each work-phase stage is still missing.

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When to use it

• A customer has committed to buy specific styles, colorways, and quantities, and you need to open the live record the rest of the deal will hang off.
• An approved quotation is ready to convert into the order it was offered against.
• A previous order needs to be re-run for the same customer — clone the source order to seed a fresh one from the same styles, colorways, and sizes.

If the styles do not yet exist, develop them first — see Develop a style. If the costing isn’t yet in place, build the cost sheet first — see Build the cost sheet.

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Prerequisites

• A customer record for the buyer. Set on the order header at create and cannot be changed afterwards. Your administrator manages the customer master.
• At least one style to run — a style master the order line will link to via Style master No..
• An approved quotation, when the order is being opened by convert. Direct create has no quotation prerequisite.
• The relevant per-tenant lookup lists the header pulls from — currency, trade-term defaults, and destination options — set up by your administrator.
• An FX rate in your tenant’s FX-rate master for the order’s currency on or before the Order date (or today, when no order date is set). The platform captures the rate at create.
• Order write permission for the user opening, editing, or driving the order. Clone is restricted to a separate capability — typically administrator or merchandiser — that your administrator configures.

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Roles involved

Users with order write permission open orders, build the line-up, set prices, advance the work phase, change the commercial status, and convert an approved quotation into an order. The platform gates these actions by capability, not by job title — sales, merchandising, and administrator roles that carry the capability may all act on an order. Sales users see only the orders they are the assigned sales on; administrator, owner, finance, and merchandiser roles see every order in the tenant. The clone action is restricted to a separate capability.

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Step-by-step

1. Open the order.
   • From a quotation. Open the approved quotation and choose Convert to order. A new order opens carrying the customer, currency, every style line (with the link to its style master where the quote was linked), every colorway, every size, and every unit price, and the order keeps a back-link to the source quotation. The source quotation is marked Converted.
   • From scratch. Open the Orders module and choose Create order. A new order opens, ready for the header.
   • From a previous order. Open the source order and choose Clone. A fresh order opens with the source’s styles, colorways, and sizes copied in and quantities reset to zero. Whether the BOM and cost-sheet versions are cloned alongside is set by your administrator on the tenant.
   On any of the three paths, the platform assigns the new order its Order no. — you do not pick it.

   

2. Fill the header.
   • Customer — pick the buyer from the customer master. Required. Cannot be changed after create.
   • Brand — pick the customer’s brand the order is for. Optional.
   • Assigned sales — assign the sales user driving the deal. Optional, but the assignment is what makes the order visible to a sales-role user.
   • Currency — pick the order’s commercial currency. Required. The platform captures the FX rate from the tenant’s FX-rate master at create against the Order date (or today, when no order date is set).
   • Order date — set the date the order is opened with the customer. Optional, but it determines the date the FX rate lookup uses.
   • Ship date — set the committed delivery date. Optional but the date the order’s backward-scheduled production timeline counts back from.
   • Season — type the selling season the order belongs to.
   • Trade term — pick the commercial term that governs delivery (e.g. FOB, CIF, DDP). The form’s defaults are typical values; the field accepts any term your tenant uses.
   • Destination — set the shipping destination the trade term applies to: a port for FOB or CIF, a full delivery address for DDP. Leave it blank to pull the customer’s default; a freshly-typed destination is saved to the tenant lookup for reuse.
   • Deposit % — set the deposit percentage the customer is expected to pay upfront. The form pre-fills the tenant default; edit as needed.
   • Customer work-order no. — optionally record the customer’s own work-order reference for the deal.
   • Custom order no. — optionally set a display override of the order number that prints on customer-facing exports.
   • Notes — type any internal note for the order.
3. Build the order’s line-up. Open the order’s styles section and add the styles the order runs.

   

   For each style:
   • Add the style. Pick the style master by Style master No. from the style-master picker. Selecting the master pulls the customer-facing style number, name, gender, finish, and fabric composition into the line as a snapshot, and links the line to the master.
   • Add colorways. Pick one or more colorways from the style master’s defined colors. Several colorways can be added under one style line in a single step.
   • Apply a size template and enter quantities. Apply a size template (such as standard apparel or numeric sizing), and enter the per-size Qty and Unit price for each colorway. Pricing is per-size — a single colorway can carry different prices across sizes.
   • The platform refreshes the order’s Order amount and Deposit amount on the same write — there is no separate “compute totals” step.
4. Open each style in the context of this order to pin its versions. From the line-up, open the style. A banner shows which order you are in; editing the BOM, cost sheet, or MO from there scopes your changes to this order’s version of the style, never to another order running the same style. Approve the order’s BOM and cost sheet before issuing the order’s MO so the version pinned for the run is the one the team has signed off on. See Styles and style vs. order vs. MO for the editing detail.
5. Walk the order along the work-phase spine. A new order opens in the inquiry work phase. From there, the order advances one stage at a time along the spine — through development sample, quotation, PI sent, PO received, procurement, production samples, bulk production, and shipped.

   

   Some advances are taken manually by the team when each step is done; others happen automatically the moment the platform sees a triggering event:
   • PI sent is advanced automatically when a proforma invoice is created for the order.
   • Procurement is advanced automatically when the order’s first BOM is approved.
   • Bulk production is advanced automatically when the pre-production sample is approved.
   • Shipped is advanced automatically when a shipment for the order goes in transit.
   The remaining advances — past inquiry, the development sample, the PI, and procurement — are taken manually when each step is done. The work phase moves forward one stage at a time and is not rewound. See order lifecycle for the canonical model.
6. Confirm the deal on the commercial side. Alongside the work phase, the order carries a commercial status the team sets to communicate where the deal stands. Move the status from inquiry through quotation to confirmed when the customer has committed, so the rest of the team can plan against a real deal. When you upload an order-confirmation document to the order’s Documents surface, the platform prompts you with a one-click action to mark the order confirmed — a suggestion you can take or dismiss, not an automatic transition. The one place the platform writes status itself is when production work is started on the order — opening the order’s production record flips the status to production.
7. Track progress on the order detail. The order’s detail page organizes the day-to-day work into four sections — Overview for the headline view, the readiness snapshot, and the backward schedule; Style & Spec for the style line-up and the styling artifacts (grading, production spec, product cards, style summary, samples); Shipment & Documents for production, purchase orders, subcontracts, customer shipments, outbound legs, and attached files; and Finance & Communication for the payment plan, invoices, AP summary, and the order’s conversation thread. See the Order page for the layout in full. As the work moves on, the order’s detail surfaces:
   • Payment progress. A progress bar shows how much of the order total has been received against the order, derived from the receipts recorded against it. It caps at 100% but still surfaces an overpayment if one occurs, and shows the outstanding balance.
   • Shipment status. The order’s shipments show what has been planned and what has left the factory, so you can see fulfillment against the ordered quantities.
   • Readiness. The readiness view applies the order’s backward-scheduled timeline and highlights milestones that are on time, at risk, or late — your early warning that a ship date is in danger.

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Decision points

• Convert vs. direct-create vs. clone. Convert when an approved quotation is what the customer has accepted — the customer, currency, styles, colorways, sizes, and unit prices carry forward, and the source quote stays linked as the back-reference. Direct-create when there is no quotation in play. Clone when the same customer is re-running a previous order — the styles, colorways, and sizes copy in, quantities reset to zero, and you fill the new quantities for the re-run.
• Approve upstream before issuing the MO. Approve the order’s BOM, finalise its grading, and attach the customer’s brand-tab library items before issuing the MO — the MO workbook renders only from records that are approved and complete. See Build a manufacturing order (MO).
• Cancel vs. complete. Cancel an order (status → cancelled) when the deal is off. Mark it complete (status → completed) when the deal is closed from the commercial side. Both are terminal — header and line edits are refused from this point on, and the record stays on file as the audit trail. Orders cannot be deleted.

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Business rules in play

These rules govern this workflow. They are documented once on the Order page; this workflow only summarizes.

• One order is per-customer and per-currency, and the customer cannot be changed after create. See Business rules.
• Order no. is assigned at create and never changes, by your tenant’s numbering scheme.
• Currency and FX rate are captured at create. The rate is read from the tenant’s FX-rate master against the Order date (or today, when no order date is set).
• The order’s totals are derived from the size grid, not entered. Order amount is the sum of Qty × Unit price across the grid; Deposit amount is Order amount × Deposit % / 100. Both refresh on the same write as any change.
• An order starts in the inquiry work phase, and the spine advances one stage at a time. See order lifecycle.
• Edits are refused on a terminal status. Once the order is completed or cancelled, header and line edits are refused.
• Orders are not deleted. Cancellation is the canonical way to stop work on a deal that is no longer happening.

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Dates set or affected

• Order date — set by the user on the header at create; optional. Used to look up the FX rate snapshot, and printed on the order’s documents as the order’s date.
• Ship date — the committed delivery date set by the user; optional. The date the order’s backward-scheduled production timeline counts back from. Editable after create — changing it recomputes the milestone target dates.
• Milestone target dates — derived dates the platform produces by reading your tenant’s lead-time offsets and counting back from Ship date. Each target date is the latest the step can happen and still hit the ship date; the chain reflects the offsets your administrator has set up, so it carries your own lead times rather than generic assumptions.
• Created, Last updated — set by the platform.

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What happens next

A confirmed order is the bridge between sales and production. From an open order:

1. Issue the order’s MOs. When the order’s BOM and cost sheet for a given style are signed off, issue the MO for that style. Issuing freezes the MO’s pinned versions and its rendered content, so the factory sees the picture the order team stands behind.
2. Drive production. Factory orders cover the outsourced work — one factory order can span several orders and styles at once, so the order’s styles may be grouped with others on a shared factory order. Purchase orders for fabric and trims are raised through the factory order, so buying traces back through the factory order to the order it serves.
3. Cut shipments from the order. A shipment going in transit advances the order’s work phase to shipped automatically. When the order ships in several batches to different places — or the transport mode changes, say sea to air — each shipment batch can carry its own destination without changing the order’s default.
4. Settle the finance side. The proforma invoice, the deposit and balance invoices, the payment plan, and the customer receipts all read the order as their anchor. The deposit percentage on the order header is what the payment plan’s deposit milestone is sized against; creating a PI also advances the order’s work phase to PI sent.

When the deal is closed, mark the order’s commercial status completed. When the deal is off, mark it cancelled. Both are terminal — the order stays on file as the audit record either way.

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Best practices

• Convert approved quotations rather than retyping. The convert path carries the customer, currency, styles, colorways, sizes, and unit prices forward in one step and leaves a clean back-link to the source quote.
• Open every line against a style master. Linking via Style master No. ties the line to a real style record so the order’s BOM, cost sheet, MO, and readiness all scope to the right style.
• Set the Ship date as accurately as you can. It is the date the backward-scheduled production timeline counts back from; an optimistic ship date pulls every milestone with it.
• Set the trade term and destination together. The destination depends on the trade term — a port for FOB or CIF, a full delivery address for DDP — and the customer’s defaults pre-fill where you leave them blank.
• Approve the BOM, finalise the grading, and attach brand-tab items before issuing the MO. The MO workbook renders only from records that are approved and complete; the team is the gate. See Build a manufacturing order (MO).
• Walk the work phase forward as each step is done. The manual advances are how the team signals operational progress to the rest of the business; the automatic advances handle the rest.
• Confirm on the commercial side as soon as the deal is real. A confirmed status is the signal the rest of the team plans against — the styles, quantities, and ship date are commitments from this point on.
• Cancel rather than try to delete. Orders cannot be removed once opened; cancellation leaves a clear, auditable record that the deal is off and stops further work without breaking downstream references.

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Related pages

• Order
• Order lifecycle
• Style vs. order vs. MO
• Styles
• Quotations
• Create a quotation
• Production
• Shipments
• Finance