A customer confirms an order for a hundred pieces. Forty are ready, so forty go out and get billed. The remaining sixty exist only in a conversation, a WhatsApp message, or somebody's memory — and three weeks later nobody can say with confidence whether they were sent, or how many.
Why the invoice cannot carry this
An invoice is a record of what you supplied. It is the wrong place to hold what you promised, because those are different quantities and they part ways the moment a delivery goes out in stages. Trying to make one document do both jobs means either over-billing at the start or losing the balance at the end.
So the commitment needs its own record
What was ordered, by whom, when it is expected, and — the part that matters — how much of each line has actually been billed so far. That last figure is what turns a pile of orders into something you can read: what is still owed to the customer, line by line.
How BizGST Pro does it
A sales order holds the customer, the expected date, any advance received, and the lines. Each line carries both the quantity ordered and the quantity invoiced so far. Convert the order to an invoice and only the remaining quantity is carried across — forty billed, sixty still sitting on the order, without anyone working out the difference.
The status follows the quantities
An order is open, partially invoiced, or invoiced, and that follows from the line quantities rather than from somebody remembering to change a dropdown. The list also totals what is still open across every order, which is the number worth knowing before you promise anything else.
Where this earns its keep
- Staged deliveries, where the same order is billed three or four times.
- Goods on order against an advance, so the advance sits with the commitment it belongs to.
- Any trade where the gap between the order and the last delivery is measured in weeks.
Where it does not
If you bill everything you sell the moment you sell it, an order record is a form to fill in for no return. The value here comes entirely from the gap between promising and supplying. No gap, no need.
One thing to keep honest
The status is only as true as the invoicing that feeds it. Bill an order outside the product — a manual invoice that does not come from the order — and the order still shows the quantity as owed. The record tracks what you billed through it, not what left the premises.