Sales orders in QuickBooks Online: reserving stock before you invoice
Sales orders in QuickBooks Online reserve inventory before you invoice; here is who can use them and how to build and convert one.
A question that keeps surfacing among QuickBooks Online merchants is how to track a customer order before anything is billed. The answer, on the plans that include it, is the sales order. It is a non-posting transaction, so it reserves inventory without touching your books. When the order is ready to move, it converts to an invoice or a purchase order in a few steps.
A transaction that holds stock without touching the books
In plain terms, a sales order records what a customer wants to buy, and in what quantity, before any invoice goes out. Because the transaction is non-posting, nothing lands in your ledger when you save it. What changes instead is the committed quantity of each product on the order. That figure is the practical payoff: it tells you when stock is spoken for and when it is time to reorder.
Sales orders live on Plus and Advanced
Manual sales orders are limited to QuickBooks Online Plus and QuickBooks Online Advanced. On simpler plans the transaction type simply is not offered, and subscribers there often discover the gap the hard way. A second, quieter boundary catches Plus users in particular. Revenue recognition schedules, covered below, belong to Advanced alone, even though the orders themselves exist on both plans.
Creating a sales order from scratch
Start from the plus icon, labelled New or Create depending on your setup, and pick Sales Order from the menu. Choose the customer, then review the shipping address and correct it if the goods are headed elsewhere. Add each product and its quantity, and apply tax where the order is taxable.
Two kinds of notes are available: a message for the customer and an internal memo for your own records. Save when you are finished, and print from the same screen if you want a copy. The committed quantity for every item updates the moment the order is saved.
Turning an estimate into a sales order
There is a second route in, and it begins with an estimate rather than a blank form. Open the customer center from your list of apps, then open your estimates. Find the quote you want, open the dropdown in the Action column, and choose the option to convert it.
Opening the estimate itself works too: its activity panel offers the same conversion under More actions. Review the new order, adjust anything that has changed since the quote, and save. The link back to the source estimate survives the conversion, and individual line items keep links of their own.
From sales order to invoice
When it is time to bill, you should not retype anything. From your list of apps, open the sales area, then the sales orders list, and find the order in question. Use the dropdown in the Action column to convert the order to a customer invoice. Check the result and save it; the order’s details carry straight across. The same menu family covers conversion to a purchase order, which suits sales fulfilled by stock you do not yet hold.
The multicurrency catch
You can take an order for a customer who pays in a foreign currency, updating the exchange rate as you go. The caution comes before that. Once multicurrency is switched on, it cannot be switched off, and your home currency cannot be changed afterwards either. Treat the setting as a one-way door before you commit to it.
Revenue recognition belongs to Advanced
The orders themselves exist on both Plus and Advanced, but the recognition option attached to them does not. If you are on Advanced and you added a revenue-recognition item to the order, the schedule itself is set later. You configure it on the invoice you create from that order, not on the order beforehand. Plus subscribers can run the entire workflow above and never see that scheduling step, because the feature is absent from their plan. Knowing where the boundary sits saves a fruitless hunt through the menus.
As we see it, the whole workflow forms a chain: estimate to sales order to invoice, with the order holding stock in between. Every link in that chain is a dropdown choice rather than a data-entry job. For merchants who previously balanced invoices against spreadsheets, that is the whole appeal.