Method Community

Hello!

I am setting out to learn how to use Method so that I can come up with an onboarding solution for the rest of our company.  

We get a lot of customer requests to simply repeat one of their previous orders.  Rather than having sales techs rebuild a whole new estimate from scratch, is there a way to copy a pre-existing estimate or invoice?

Also, has anyone found a way to simulate the functionality of pricebooks?  I know this is not a native feature of Quickbooks, but it is a feature of many CRM packages, so I was hoping Method would have found a way to imcorporate it.  Essentially, many of our customers have negotiated for special pricing that we must honor, and it has always been a hassle to look up each individual SKU on a given estimate or invoice to apply that specific pricing.  

I'm really curious to see what we find here to these questions.  I think one of the already built in procedures created by Method for their standard set of CRM screens is the ability to create an Invoice from an Order.  The programming for this basically creates an empty Invoice and then copies all the information from the Order into it.  That's a bit simplisitic, but that's the generatl idea.

I don't think there is anything preventing someone from creating a 2nd Invoice from any previous Order, there might need to a a few small changes.  For example, when an Order is fully invoiced it is "Closed".  The logic used by QB and Method to mark things as Closed is a bit hard to get at.  But, all the old Orders are in the database, they just might not be currently visible because of the closed flag.

Regarding pricing, at one time, my understanding was that QB could maintain a custom percentage discount per customer.  I think this could even be per item.  As if QB maintained a parrallel table to Items for each customer with a percentage discount value for each item.  I might remember this incorrectly.  So, it's not exactly like having a custom price per customer per item, but you might be able to use the percentage calculation method in a way that is invisible to the user and customer to achieve the same result.  When I implemented my part pricing this would not work for what I needed to do, but I looked at it pretty hard.

I would think it is definitely looking very hard at this price level functionality in QB since anything native in QB can be used and expanded up on in Method.

Jamie

I'll experiment with the closed orders and see if I can come up with a safe-for-the-books way to duplicate them.  Hopefully, that'll lead to a solution I can present to the boss, and if it's workable, I'll share it here.  To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised that a 'Copy this Order' option wasn't already available, since Method has so many other well-done features.

As for the price-books, I really need precise pricing per item, because the primary use for this is going to be GSA pricing -- so it's not like a percentage discount.  I'm figuring that this isn't natively supported -- and short of duplicating the SKUs and marking them as special -- I was hoping someone had found a work-around or third-party way of doing it.

Hi sbonner,

Customizing a button to create a copy of an Invoice record is definitely possible. As Jamie alluded to, you'll want to take a look at actions for the Create Sales Order button on the QuickBooks_Estimate screen (you can find these by checking the actions for the Create Sales Order event on the More actions... button). You can reverse-engineer this button and use its actions (modified somewhat, of course) to create a Copy Invoice button for your Invoice screen, it shouldn't be too tricky.

As far as price levels go, we have a post in our blog here that explains how to implement these in Method.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Hope this helps.

- Justin

Sbonner,

Most businesses using accrual based accounting, as opposed to cash based accounting, recognize revenue at the time a product is shipped or Invoiced.  There are some other complicated princicples of recognizing revenue, but in general a Sales Order is not a General Ledger posting transaction.  You'd want to check with your accounting folks, but generally you can do anything you want with Sales Orders and they will not impact your accounting.

Whether you use a closed Sales Order or Invoice as the reference for a duplicate won't impact accounnting in any fashion.  The duplication process does not change the original Order or Invoice.

But, I think there are several reasons why it might be more clever to use the Sales Order as the template for a duplication.  It is possible to generate multiple Invoices against a single Sales Order if you partial ship something to a customer then follow up with a second shipment.  Conceptually the Sales Orders is a more complete record of the Customers Instructions for completeing an order and the Invoice is a follow on piece of commercial obligation documentation.  Your intention is to repeat the entire fullfilment of the customers order, not duplicate the billing.

Also, and maybe more importantly, it woudl be very easy to create a type of Template Sales Order that never truly closes or completes such that you have a short list of Sales Orders to duplicate for repeat orders.  There is nothing special about a Sales Order that sits open in QB or Method.  Yes, it shows on an open order list, and might also show a demand against inventory, but these are all just report information, not any time of posting accounting data.  So, to create a Template Sales Order you only need to create some kind of flag to look for and change the reports that show Open Orders etc. to tell them not to display the Template Orders.

Quickbooks marks a Sales Order as Closed when it sees that all items in a Sales Order have been Invoiced, greater than or equal to the Sales Order Quantity for ALL line items in a Sales Order.  The Order will remain Open if there is one line item not completely invoiced.  It is just one flag on the Order Header and then a flag on each of the Order line items.  That's all that happens when an Order closes is that these flags get set to Closed.

Then as Justin mentioned you just copy a bunch of the same Action Sequence logic used by the Create Invoice screen and use it as the foundation of a Copy Sales Order screen.  There is one or two powerful functions that will take care of most of the work of creating a new record and copying things over very efficiently.

Jamie

Sbonner,

Regarding pricing.  How many different prices would you need per Item?

I went down a similiar road.  % based price levels did not work for me.  I needed about 10 different prices based on Quantity and our traditional algorythm for this could not be duplicated using the QB price level data structures.  So, I just added 10 new price fields to the Items table.  It's a brute force, flat file approach, but it works just fine.  So, I have an Action Sequence after the Quantity is entered for a line item in an order.  Quickbooks has several different Item Types like Inventory, Non-Inventory, Service, and Other?, and if the line item is a Non-Inventory item, my Action Sequence looks for Quantity based pricing for that item based on the Quantity of the Order and then replaces the default Price value for the schedule value.  This could work well for just Several or even a dozen or so customers.  I don't know at what point this scheme does not scale well.  You might not want to add 100's of new fields to a table and at some point this data table should be broken out as a related table.

You can certainly create an entirely new table, but there are some limitations how you can use relational database structures in Method.  If you can keep the relations only one level deep, that helps.  For example the Sales Order screen works will with the Sales Order parent table, and then the Sales Order line item table.  Within the Line items you then have a relation to the drop downs for say Items.  But you can't really relate another table to Items.  You can, but it's a bit hard or impossible to work with programmatically with Action Sequencess.  Or, it just looked hard to me, and you can do almost anything without creating that complexity.

Jamie