Tip of the Month for: October 2015
Viewing Sales Orders and Purchase Orders Simultaneously
The new release of Answers provides a popular feature that was voted on by many users on the ballot earlier this year. This feature allows simultaneously viewing both a sales order and a purchase order provided you can rearrange the windows on your monitor and see both effectively. In the past if you requested to edit the P/O from Order Entry, you were taken to the P/O, but could not get back to the sales order until you saved out of the P/O. Now the P/O is opened in a separate and independent window, meaning you can move around in it but also still having access to move around in the sales order if desired.
After P/O’s have been created or updated by Order Entry,
they can be reviewed, edited, printed, faxed, or emailed
right from within Order Entry. This feature has been
improved in several ways in order to make it easier to
review both the sales order and the purchase order
simultaneously as long as the user respects any record lock
messages they may receive if they start making changes to
one or the other.
In the past you would not be prompted with a list of the
P/O’s created/updated by the order until you saved, printed,
or exited the order. Now if you want to see a list of
the P/O’s with the ability to review, print, fax, or email
them before saving/exiting/printing the order, you can do so
by clicking on “Edit-->Review P/O’s Updated by this Order”
from the pull-down menu bar across the top of the window
while on the Detail or Totals tab in Order Entry. Or
you will also be prompted automatically with this list when
saving/printing the order as in the past. However this
window now has an extra button to allow going [<
Back] to the sales order you were working on or
continuing to save or print the order using the [Close
>] button.
If you elect to take further action upon one of the P/O(s) listed in the review window, it will open up that P/O in a new and separate window meaning that you will be able to still have access to use Order Entry while in the P/O if desired. This would be the very same concept as if you went back to the Answers menu and opened up an Order Entry window and a P/O Entry window. Both can be open at the same time and you can navigate around both transactions to compare information on both. If the sales order has multiple purchase orders linked to it, then you can even have multiple P/O windows open while leaving the sales order open too.
However it is important to note that record locks must still be enforced as changes or editing is done on one or the other if both are simultaneously open. For example if a field is changed on the header of one or the other and it is a field that is automatically updated to the other (some fields are configurable to update or not), then the program will still attempt to keep these in sync and this is where record locks must still be enforced. The same is true of changing detail line items that are linked from a sales order to a P/O. If a user does encounter a record lock they simply need to close or save out of the other program. So if they change something or encounter a lock message in P/O Entry, then click back on the Order Entry window, (even if you cannot see it and have to use the Taskbar button to get back to it) and then close/save out of the order. Likewise if you change something or receive a lock message in Order Entry, then close/save out of the P/O and then go back to Order Entry and you should be allowed to continue.
Since additional fields between sales orders and purchase orders are linked together on factory direct orders, this can become even more noticeable on directs than on regular orders.
But the user should be able to move from tab to tab in both programs to review and compare the two documents and save or print/email/fax both documents using this new method of opening up the P/O Entry window.
Since we are on the subject, also note that the reverse of this process is now new and available from within the P/O Entry program. If you choose to view or edit the sales order # from a P/O line item, you will now see a new button that will allow editing the sales order. When this new button is used P/O Entry will open up a completely separate and independent window of Order Entry with the sales order related to the P/O line item at which time all of the above functionality and rules described above will be the same.