Sales can be created in 3 ways:

1. Directly from your PearlCart website
2. Created manually by your staff using the Electronic Point Of Sale (EPOS) screen. (Please see the retail user support section for more information)
3. Created manually using the admin screens

Sales are set to one of a number of statuses to keep track of where they are in the process.  For example:

Quote -> Stock allocated -> Please ship -> Packed -> Shipped -> Closed

Order statuses are editable, so there is no guarantee that any of the above statuses will still be available on the demo!

If you are not shipping tangible goods then a number of these stages can be skipped. A sales invoice for labour, for example, would go from Quote directly to Closed when the invoice is raised. A sale is editable until it is posted to your accounts, at which point the invoice is raised (and emailed automatically to the customer if required).

Stock is set to be 'allocated' on a per item basis, within each order. This means that limited stock can be allocated to specific customers. The Sales overview page will show which orders have had stock updated (black tick), which are fully allocated (green tick), which are part allocated (orange tick) and which are not allocated at all (red cross).

An order can be shipped, posted to accounts and modified regardless of the stock allocation. If required you can set up the system to prevent orders that are not 100% allocated from being packed, shipped or closed.

For orders created by your website, you can set Pearl to automatically allocate all stock possible when the order is created, to prevent others from buying the same product if stock is limited. You may wish to do this for some payment methods and not others. For orders placed with unconfirmed credit card details [payment method = credit card via PDQ], for example, you may choose not to reserve stock while for Google Checkout orders where payment details have been confirmed, you do want to confirm stock. These settings are made in the Setup->Payment methods screen.

You cannot allocate more stock than you have. Once 'stock allocated' = 'stock in warehouse' then 'stock on hand' = 0. You can override this rule in the company settings to allow allocation of stock on unreceived purchase orders.

To view a list of current sales, click Sales->Any status

You can choose whether or not the sale contents are displayed on this page if you have a large number of items per sale.

Click the edit icon on any sales order to view the details. Sales can be assigned to a department or project for more detailed reporting. Comments can be added to orders at any point, with the option of emailing a copy to the customer.

If your contact database contains less than 500 customers you can create a sale by Sales->New sale/credit.

Demo: Create a sale for the contact you added earlier on. Search for the contact using the quick search box, hover over the "menu" link then click "new order". You have now created an empty quote.

Since Pearl is a complete integrated system, it knows what the customer account status is... you would be shown if the contact is over their credit limit and you can opt to prevent sales completely when a customer goes over their credit limit.

Click "add items". This screen will be used in a number of areas, so get familiar with it. Type "tee" in the search box on the left hand side of the page, then click one of the products displayed. It will be added to the list on the right. Change prices, tax codes or name if required. Add more items and then click "add to order". Make sure the order total is over £10
 
View the items under the product info tab. Add a shipping price and see the order total change.

Choose a payment method (set it to "account") and click save.

Edit the email addresses on the order (under the Address info tab) to your personal email address, add a comment and change the order status to "please ship" in the Status history tab. You'll see that you'll have an email from the demo system notifying you of an update to your order. Along with other Pearl emails, this template is editable.

If you want to close the sale and raise an invoice at any point, click 'post to accounts'.

Non-product sales

It is quite likely that you will want to create sales snvoices for customers for items such as time, labour or services. Create these items on Pearl as a regular product, but make sure that 'manage stock' is set to 'no'

If you are creating a sales invoice for a one-off charge, then you can add the 'Misc item' to the invoice and change it's name and price to whatever you like. The stock or asset value of misc items is not tracked. You can add other items, such as 'design fee' or 'labour' as an item where stock is not tracked.