The more you work with your EZ Process Pro system, the more you’ll find that 3 specific functions drive all other functionality in the system: Sales, Ordering, and Shipping. This series is designed to walk you through the basics of these steps so that you can see how they interact with one another and how a Sale moves through the process.
Video Transcript
The second core function of EZ Process Pro is Ordering. In your system settings, you have defined the Reserve or Order trigger point for your system. This could be at the time of the sale, the sale being fully paid off, or the sale being paid to a certain percent. When the sale hits that trigger point, the ordering process begins.
In our example sale, I sold an item that we don't have in our current inventory and paid 100% of the total price at the time of the sale. That means the sale hit the trigger point. If we had it in inventory, it would have been reserved and ready for delivery. Instead, it’ll need to be ordered.
Items are ordered by Purchase Orders following 5 basic steps: Identify what items need to be ordered, Generate a rough draft of the PO for the relevant vendors, Finalize that PO, Receive the items on the PO, and Pay for the items on the PO. Let’s walk through these steps together with the item our customer bought.
Step 1: Identify what items need to be ordered.
Since we don’t have this item in inventory, EZ Process Pro automatically added it to a page called “Items for PO”. This page collects all items that need to be purchased for stock or customer sales so that they can be added to a Purchase Order.
I’m going to select the vendor we ordered from, then search based on the sale number to narrow the search results. On this new page, I’ll select what vendor I’m ordering the sale from, the Quantity I want, and submit it. This brings us into step 2, Generate a rough draft of the PO.
To see our PO’s rough draft, we’re going to “Unprinted Purchase Orders”. These are the Purchase Orders that can still be modified and have not been sent to the vendor yet. We’re going to select the one for the vendor we are buying from and click generate. If I need to add or remove items, I can, but in this case everything looks good for our customer so I’m going to go ahead and send this off to our vendor without any changes.
I’ll write out who the PO is for in the Attention field, then I’ll choose the location I want the item shipped to. I’ll choose the Ship By day here. Since I’ll be emailing my vendor the PO today, I want them to ship it to me tomorrow. I do one last double check, then we’re ready for step 3: Finalize the PO.
To Finalize the PO, I’ll either print, email, or directly send the PO straight to the vendor depending on the integration I have set up. For our example, we’ll just print the PO.
We’ll say time has magically passed and the item has arrived at our store so we can go straight to step 4: Receive items on the PO. There are two ways to receive items. We can go to the PO, or we can go to the Receive all from List page which allows you to check in a myriad of items at a time. We’ll go to Receive all from List.
I’ll choose the Vendor then select what PO I want to see, since I want to limit my search results here to move more quickly. On the next page I see the item I have on order. I’ll fill out 2 important fields at the top of this page. Firstly, I want to enter this item into the inventory of this location. Secondly, the vendor sent me the invoice number 12345, so I’ll attach this item to that invoice number here, so that EZ Process Pro can track whether it has been paid for in my Accounts Payable. I’ll leave the date and name as default.
In our example, we’ll say that we’ve inspected the item and determined there was no damage and we got the full quantity that we ordered, so we’ll fill out that 1 item was received. In our example, we don’t need to adjust the cost or add any freight or adjustment so we’ll go ahead and submit the item to inventory. Let’s check and see what that looks like.
We’ll go to the Inventory tab, click View Inventory, then enter the manufacturer name and item number for what we just checked in. There we go, now we have 1 in stock! If we click on it for more information, we can see that the item is in fact reserved for our customer. We are ready to go!
Incidentally, if we had had the item in stock, you would have skipped the ordering process to go straight to this step. You won’t need to check inventory every time but if you’re ever curious you’ll be able to see inventory both here and on the “Manage Sale” page, as well as various system reports.
In the real world, you’d move onto step 5, paying the invoice. Since this video is just an overview we’ll cover that in depth in later training. For now, all you need to focus on is understanding the following concepts:
- Items are reserved or ordered at a specific point after the sale that is defined by System Settings.
- Items that are In Stock are reserved. Items that are not in stock need to be ordered through a PO for the customer.
- There are 5 steps to making a Purchase Order:
- Identify what items need to be ordered
- Generate a rough draft of the PO for the relevant vendors
- Finalize that PO
- Receive the items on the PO
- Pay for the items on the PO
- The ordering core function starts when a sale is made or paid for enough to trigger the process, and ends when the item is in inventory and reserved for the customer.
Just like that, you now know how to order items for a customer. As you continue learning about EZ Process Pro’s software, you’ll find more ways to streamline the ordering process and fit it in with your operations.