Introduction to the sales module
Learn how to make sales through Cin7 Core, from receiving orders to fulfilling customer orders.
Is there a feature you would like to see or an improvement that would help your business? Please make feature requests on our forum, requests are reviewed based on popularity and importance for potential inclusion in future development releases.
Sale module user permissions
Cin7 Core offers fine-grained control over user permissions. Grant users full or read-only permission to the different features of the sales module, and create roles with pre-defined permissions to assign to users. See Introduction to users and Manage roles for how to create user roles and User permissions explained - Sale for sale permissions.
Sale process customization
Customize your sale process settings according to the needs of your business. This includes setting a default tax rule for sales, limiting stock availability to the sale location or all locations, enable quote approval, and many more. See General Settings – Sale process customization for more information.
Processing a sale
Processing sales is the main purpose of the sale module in Cin7 Core. Through the sale module, you can create quotes, sales orders, and invoices, then track sales orders through pick, pack, and ship. Our sales process design allows quick duplication of line items from the previous stage, streamlining your operations.
There are three types of sale currently available in Cin7 Core:
Simple sales are used for sales of goods or goods and services, with a single invoice and fulfillment. Most sales will fall under a simple sale.
Service sales are used for orders without stock items (i.e. orders of services or non-inventory items only). In a service sale, the fulfillment sections are skipped as there is no change in inventory. Learn more about service sales.
Advanced sales allow items to be shipped and/or invoiced separately while still being considered part of the same sale. It also allows multiple credit notes to be issued for a single sale order. You can convert simple sales into advanced sales but not vice versa. Learn more about Advanced sales - Multiple fulfillments.
Cin7 Core captures orders from multiple sources, from Core channels such as our B2B and POS platforms and from third-party ecommece channels integrated with Core. You can find additional instructions for these in their section of the Cin7 Help Center.
Quotes and orders
Produce a cost estimate of goods and/or services upon customer enquiry with a quote. This can help prospective buyers decide which company to buy from and/or receive services from. Alternatively, skip a quote to start directly with a sales order. See quotes and orders for more details.
You can still authorize a sale order without enough stock to complete the sale. In this case, you will be able to split the order, backorder out of stock items, or create a purchase order for the items in the sale.
Invoices and payments
Issue invoices for your customers informing them of the agreed pricing, goods and services provided, and any other additional costs associated with the order. Apply payments to authorized invoices which can then by synced to Xero or QuickBooks Online. Use customer credit or unrefunded credit notes as payment against other invoices. Partially invoice a sale, or apply a large customer payment to multiple outstanding invoices at once. See Invoices and payments for more information.
Customer Credits
Customer credit is money that you owe to the customer, and which can be used against future payments. Customer credits can arise from credit notes issued as store credit rather than cash payment, prepayments and overpayments. Customers in POS can make deposits on layby sales or receive store credit; however, these will only apply to POS sales and will not be able to be used against sale invoices processed through the Cin7 Core web portal.
Learn more about Customer Credits/Deposits.
Recurring invoices and orders
Recurring sales allow you to program recurring sales for a customer at weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annual intervals. Recurring invoices will either be automatically generated on the date set or can be pre-generated earlier than the scheduled time.
Learn more about Recurring orders/invoices.
Picking items for a sale
Pick instructs the warehouse to gather the merchandise listed in the sale order (based on quantities, serial numbers, batch numbers, etc.), allocating the stock and preventing it sold in a subsequent order. As this is solely a set of instructions to the warehouse that may or may not be completed, decrease in inventory will not be affected until they fully complete the shipment process. Depending on your sale settings, you can pick sale items from the sale location only or from multiple locations. If this step does not apply to your business (like, for example, for some eCommerce platforms), it can be set to automatic in your organization settings. See Pick items for a sale for more information.
We recommend our application, Cin7 Core WMS for fast picking from mobile devices.
Pack and ship an order
Pack involves taking the picked stock items and preparing them to be shipped, selecting the quantity of boxes and which items will be sent in which box. Ship takes the packed boxes, assigns a carrier and (if applicable) records the tracking number. Once the merchandise is fulfilled and shipped to the customers, the shipment process will record the transaction and decrease the number of items in the inventory. If these steps do not apply to your business (like, for example, for some eCommerce platforms), they can be set to automatic in your organization settings.
See pack and ship an order for more information.
Other fulfillment features
Dropshipping
Dropship orders directly from your suppliers to your customers, without keeping inventory in stock. You will need to assign suppliers to a product and enable dropshipping always or optionally for the product to dropship. Dropship orders do not have pick, pack, or ship stages. Learn more about Dropshipping.
External fulfillment and shipping services
Cin7 Core supports integration with a variety of shipping services which can then be used to estimate shipping rates and generate shipping labels for your deliveries.
If you utilize a third-party fulfillment service such as Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to ship your orders, you can connect the service to Cin7 Core as an external inventory management location.
See Shipping and Fulfillment for more information.
Sales views
The sales module has three views, the General View, Accounting View, and Fulfillment View. The information and order statuses displayed on your sales list depends on the selected view. Available actions and filters also depend on the selected view. Learn about the different views and how they can help you track your sales, estimates, fulfillments, and credit notes.
See Sales views and order status values for more information.
Credit notes and refunds
A credit note is considered a negative invoice. It is a way to amend the details of a sale order or invoice after it has already been authorized, for example, if a unit price has been overcharged, if a shipment is partially or completely incorrect or damaged, or for a discount applied to an order once the sale order is completed. It is also possible to create a standalone customer credit note that is not linked to any particular sale. When authorizing a credit note associated with a sale, you will be given the option to restock the items from the order.
Learn more about Customer Credit Notes and Refunds.
Attachments and activity logs
Any documents printed or emails sent through the sale module are saved in the Attachments section of a sale for easy retrieval. All activities performed by users or by Cin7 Core are logged in the Logs and attributes section.
Sales bulk actions
Execute actions in bulk for multiple sales from the sales list. These actions are available for both simple and advanced sales. Using this feature, you can fill and authorize sales process steps in bulk, including completing the whole sale. Void, undo, and generating sales documents and emails can all be performed in bulk.
Learn more about Sales bulk actions.
Price tiers
Set up to 10 price points for each product. Customers are assigned a price tier which sets what price they can buy products for (e.g. Retail, Wholesale). Price tier names are set up in General Settings while values are managed from a product's details (Inventory -> Products -> [selected product]).
Product-level prices can be set and modified during a sale by users with the correct permissions. You can also create rules to dynamically calculate product prices, e.g. according to exchange rates, supplier prices, and more.
Learn more about Managing price tiers.
Managing customers
Add and edit customer details including customer addresses and multiple contacts per customer.
Learn more about Customers.
Customer Sales Statement Reports (Outstanding Balances)
View and print sales statements with outstanding invoices for each customer using Customer Sales Statement Reports. A Customer Sales Statement Report is a report consisting of a consolidated list of all the transactions carried out for a particular customer. It is a good business practice to send regular statements to your customers, so they are aware of the amounts still owing on their account. There are two options:
Sale Statement Activity – Activity statement will show all activity within the selected date range. If there are invoices still unpaid from before the date range you have selected, these will be summarised as a brought forward balance. Then all the invoices and payments received within the selected period will be listed, giving you a total due balance at the end. This is often the preferred method when you are issuing several invoices per month to a customer.
Sale Statement Outstanding – This statement will show all invoices with outstanding amounts left on them as of the date you have selected. This option is useful when a customer wants a complete list of all unpaid invoices going all the way to the beginning rather than older period ones been represented just as a brought forward balance.
Learn more about Customer Sales Statements.
Sales channels
Cin7 Core supports integration with many eCommerce and Sales channels – Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, Etsy and more! See the Integrations module for more information about supported integrations.
Product discounts and deals
Add discounts and markups to products. These can be applied at the product level, customer group level and individual customer level. Examples of product discounts are a 10% discount, a $10 discount, discounts if multiple items are purchased, and free shipping.
You can also set up more complicated combinations of discounts with product deals. Product deals can be used to apply or combine discounts at the shopping cart level for your customers, for example, if the customer's shopping cart has met specific criteria, such as including certain products or brands or meeting a certain order amount. You can also create store-wide product deals, or issue coupons which allow certain customers or groups of customers to benefit from a deal.
Learn more about Product Discounts and Product Deals.
Gift cards
Offer gift cards to your customers that they can then use to pay for your products and services. Gift cards can be used for in-app sales as well as for sales from B2B and POS sale channels. Gift cards must be enabled and set up in Cin7 Core before they can be used for in-app sales or in POS or B2B sales channels.
Learn more about Gift cards.
Sale reports
View information about your sales via the Reports module. Available reports include Sales Overview, Customer Payment Summary, and Fulfillment Details.
Most reports can be automatically generated and sent out to others using the Report Scheduling feature available to Cin7 Core customers with Automation module subscriptions.
Learn more about Sale Reports.
Cin7 Core Point of Sale
Make sales from anywhere using the Cin7 Core POS app and standard smartphones or tablets. Sales are made immediately using the POS app, sent to Cin7 Core for processing, and input payment.
Learn more about Cin7 Core POS.
Cin7 Core B2B Portal
The Cin7 Core B2B eCommerce portal has been designed to enable your customers to browse and order from your catalog 24/7. The online portal provides a scalable and flexible platform uniquely focused on companies doing business with each other (for example, manufacturers selling to distributors and wholesalers selling to retailers).
Learn more about Cin7 Core B2B Portal.