Introduction to Orders

What are Orders?

An order is a group of products you sell to a customer on a specific date. You can add as many products as you like to each order. Once an order has been added for a product or variation, the available stock on hand is decreased automatically by the order quantity. Orders can be manually entered, or imported via your connected sales channels.

Adding Manual Orders

For the purposes of this tutorial, we will also be assuming that our product already exists in Craftybase as a product.

To get to your order form for a particular product, the fastest way is to select the Add Order option in the Quick Add menu bar. Alternatively, click on the Orders tab, then click the Add Order button on the order list page.

Now that we are on the order form, let's take a closer look:

The first field, Order Date is for the date that you sold the product. You can either type a date here, or select from the calendar view.

Order Due Date is an optional field for tracking the date that the customer has requested this product. You can also either type a date here, or select from the calendar view.

Order Code can be used to add your own unique codes for this order. Codes are fully searchable, so they can be a handy way of quickly locating orders in the system.

The next field Customer is for adding information about the customer that purchased the product. For a repeat purchaser, select their name from your list or alternatively click the New Customer link to the right of the searchbox to add a new customer.

Next is your Order Line Items section. If you have clicked through to this form via a product page, you'll notice that you'll already have a line item in place so you can skip this section. If you have however started via the Order list or Quick Add menu, you'll see an empty list here. Click the "Add Order Item" to add your first product line to the order. You'll see a line appear with fields ready to edit: search for one of your products in the Search products box and then select it from the results.

Now that we have a product selected, let's take a look at this section in detail:

The first column shows the Image that represents this product. This image will be displayed on your invoice view. The second column contains information about the product and variation that this order line item is linked to. For this example to keep it simple, you'll notice that we don't have a variation selected as the second line is empty. The third line in this section is your Additional Notes which can be used to add any additional information about the line item. These notes will also be displayed on your invoice view.

In the third column, your Unit Price will be automatically populated from the Base Sale Price set for the product you have selected. You can at this stage modify this to your actual sale amount here if it is different from your default sale price. You'll notice that when you change your unit price, your total price for the order line item will be automatically calculated and updated for you.

Your Quantity column is for the quantity of the product you have sold in this order.

The next column is your Total Price and shows the total amount payable for this item. This is automatically calculated from your unit price and quantity entered. Finally, the last column contains a button to remove the line item.

Under the order line item list is a Add Order Item button that allows you to add a new row to the list - in this way, you can add as many items as you need to your order.

The next section is your Order Totals area where you can add amounts that are applied to the entire order. We'll take a closer look at each of the rows located here:

The first row is your Item Total and is calculated from all items within the order. As we only have the one item in this order, this will be exactly the same as the item total. If you have multiple items in the order then it will be the sum of all line item totals.

Next is a Discount textbox for you to enter any order level discounts you have provided to the customer (e.g $5 off). This will be removed from the order grand total and will be proportionally calculated for each of the items in your order.

Tax and Shipping are on the following rows, and like the Discount field above they are proportionally calculated onto every line item. Tax and Shipping are added to your order total.

The last row shows your Order Total which is your calculated using the following formula: Item Total - Discount + Tax + Shipping.

The next field below the totals area is for adding the customer's Delivery Address. This is optional, so if you don't need to ship your product then leave this blank.

The Paid? checkbox allows you to mark the order as fully paid for by the customer. This has no impact on any of your inventory or reporting calculations and is for your records only.

The Shipping Date is an important field as it marks when the manufacturing costs for this order are officially removed from your inventory. You'll want to ensure that all orders are marked with the exact date that the product was shipped to the customer. If you are linking your manufactures to each order item, you will notice that this date will be automatically set for you via the manufacture information.

In order to provide more segmentation and grouping to your order list, you can create custom categories and attach a category to your order using your Category field. Either select from your list of existing order categories, or add a new one using the textbox on the right hand side of the selector.

The last two fields of your order form are for free text messages. The first field, Customer Message will appear on your invoice view, so this is ideal for adding a custom message for the customer to your invoice. The Notes field is for any additional details you wish to store about this order - this field will not be presented on the invoice view so is for your records only.

When you are happy with the details of the order, click the Save Order button and you'll be taken to the order details view.

Generating Invoices

On the order details page, hovering over the ⋮ menu in the top left corner will display options for the order. Clicking on the Generate Invoice option will create and download a printable invoice that you can either print or add to an email as an attachment.

Customising your Invoices

You can upload a logo to display on your invoices and also add your complete business address via your Account Settings pages. To do this, click on your Settings icon in the top right hand corner of the page, then click the Invoice Settings link. On the form that appears, scroll down until you find your Business Address section. This address and image will be what is displayed on every invoice you generate.

Have some questions?

If you have any additional questions, please get in touch and we'll be happy to give you a hand. Alternatively, feel free to join and post your question in our official Craftybase Facebook group.