Saving and Retrieving Sales

 

Unlike AutoMate, Peach does not have the concept of “finalised” and “unfinalised” invoices for parts sales. AutoMate has that concept because all invoices are, in effect, workshop invoices, and a workshop invoice is an ongoing process.

 

Peach instead has three different invoicing (sales) systems – Point of Sale, Customer Invoicing and Workshop Invoicing.

In addition, Peach has a comprehensive system of Customer Orders.

 

AutoMate uses not finalised invoices in place of an ordering system.

The issue here is that you are accustomed to using unfinalised invoices in this way, rather than orders.

 

Peach has three invoicing (Sales) systems for different styles of sales

Point of Sale (POS) is optimised for fast over the counter sales of Parts

It has only a basic process for labour (type in a description and put in a quantity and price – this will process into the labour General Ledger account)

 

Customer Invoicing handles both Parts Sales and Service invoicing (i.e. labour) but doesn’t involve a vehicle in the labour concept

 

Workshop Invoicing is for invoicing associated with a specific vehicle or piece of equipment

To get to the point – How to keep a sale open

 

 

The idea of a customer order is that you can take an order over the phone, off a fax or some other order form.  Imagine if it was one person’s job to take the orders, then someone else may get the stock and finish it off (i.e. invoice it out)

The system will tell you if you have the stock available.

If not, there is a system of Generating Supplier Orders to order the goods you don’t have from the appropriate supplier.

When you want to invoice the order out, you go into either Point of Sale or Customer Invoices and click on the Retrieve button (F5) to pick up the order and finish the invoice.

So that is the essential difference – the idea is that the Order is the “unfinalised” concept, not the invoice.

So if you take an order and the goods have to be brought in for the customer, record it as a customer order rather than a sale.

However – read on for the easiest way to do this, direct from Point of Sale anyway. (Or else use the Customer Orders screen)

 

To make the Point of Sale more flexible, it has two functions on buttons called  “Suspend” (down the bottom) and “Store/Recall”

The Suspend button is the function you would use to “hold” a sale for use later on, and to be available to any computer on the network.

Reason is that it actually generates a Customer Order.

If you do one of these for say customer BLOG01, have a look in Customer Orders.  Put in the customer code BLOG01 and a list of their orders will be displayed.

These orders can then be “brought back” into Point of Sale or Customer Invoices by clicking on the “Retrieve” button or pressing F5

 

The second function is the Store/Recall function

This is the one you must have been using because it doesn’t make it available to other computers on the network.

The Store/Recall function is a “quick & easy” way to save some lines you have put into an invoice to get back later on.  It does not create a customer order, ie not on file, so they are not available to other computers.  Imagine you look up a couple of prices, or look to see if you have something in Point of Sale.  Then just want to hang onto that for an hour or so, but others naturally have to use the computer.  You can use the Store/Recall on just that computer to put the lines aside for later.

I have also used them to get lines off an old invoice for a customer and onto a new one – ie they have reordered parts they have purchased before.  I retrieved the old invoice, “Stored” the lines, cancelled out the old and started a new invoice and dropped the parts into it – at the same prices as last time.

 

So that is the difference between the two systems

An Order is stored, and you can both retrieve it anywhere, and get a report on all orders for one or all customers via the Reports Menu

Store and Recall if for quicky saves on the one computer.

 

From what you said, you should be mainly using the Suspend system in Point of Sale, only occasionally the Store/Recall

 

Last the easy bit – workshop invoices

Workshop invoices stand on their own, so to speak, because you don’t start up say a Point of Sale invoice and then change it into a workshop job

 

Peach workshop invoices can be commenced as a “Job Card” or as an “Invoice”

The idea is that if you are starting a job that will be added to over time, then start a Job Card

If you intend just to do an invoice and finish it off immediately, then do and Invoice.

However it doesn’t really matter if you start with a Invoice, because when you process it you have the option to complete it as Invoice or to save it as a Job Card.