Sales statuses

Over the course of the sales process, offers and orders will be handled by different departments. As the file will be handled by a large number of different people, it is important that its status can be checked. Everyone must be able to see the progress of the file. For example, is it an order yet? Have the parts been delivered?

To be able to track their progress, you can develop a classification by sales status. The status classification serves as:

• The thread of your administrative logistics
• The file's course through your company
• An indication of the person handling the file

The use of sales statuses is mandatory.

Statuses can be used in combination with sales routings to define a fixed status flow.

In addition to providing information about the progress of a file, statuses have a number of other functions:

• Statuses can be used to print lists of files that are in a particular phase. For example, a warehouse employee could print a report of the goods that are available for shipping, a planner could print a list of all files with a 'Planning' status, or a calculator could print a list of the files that have a 'Preliminary costing' status. This way, all employees can quickly see which files they should work on.
• Statuses are used as protection mechanisms (locks) for files. Locks will enable you, for instance, to prevent a sales invoice from being created for a file that is not an order yet. Protective locks are automatically applied based on status types.
• You can deny users rights for particular statuses, to prevent them from changing these statuses for files. This will also lock any processes using the statuses for these users. You can assign status rights on the Users form, using the Sales status rangeand Production status range buttons.
• Statuses enable you to run particular processes automatically. For example, you can copy default calculations to all files with a status of '05' ('Create offer calculation') in one go. This is called a "batch process", a process in which multiple files are processed.

  When running a batch process, you can also specify the status the files should be assigned after they have been processed.

Tip: Overly detailed status classifications may not be useful in practice, as files will require frequent status changes, without this providing much additional information. Statuses should serve as a guide, but often there is no need to create a status for each and every step in the process. You are therefore recommended to create an initial, concise classification of the statuses that represent the most important steps in your process. Leave sufficient room between status numbers, to allow you to add statuses if you later realize that you need more statuses.

Fields

Status type

Department

Example