Your sales representatives work hard to win sales for your company. In TekStack, they work with opportunities to discover, qualify, and propose deals. When they conclude a sale, they close that business opportunity as won.

Now it’s time to verify the purchase. Your management or accounting group steps in to check the paperwork and complete the tasks to ensure the sale is official. This is when you generate an order and issue an invoice.

To more easily understand the information and processes outlined in this article, here is a breakdown of the actions for validation, order generation and invoicing. 

Finding and Reviewing Opportunities
Payment Terms and Tax Group
Delete an Order
Generate the Order
Send the Invoice
Review Subscription History and Revenue
Revenue Categorization

Finding and Reviewing Opportunities

1. In the Revenue area, go to Opportunities. The view defaults to My Open Opportunities. Click the arrow next to it to see the view options available. Select Won Opportunities Without Orders. The list of opportunities to review is shown.

2. Click the Opportunity you want to review. When you open it, you can see all the information associated with the sale.

If you find discrepancies in the Opportunity, you can edit it by clicking Reopen.

3. To check the documents, click the Documents tab to review items such as a procurement contract, information security reports, a proposal, a signed contract. Note that this Documents library is associated with the account.

You will also see in the ribbon options for Chat and Take Notes. A Teams channel and a OneNote notebook are created for the account. You can use the Teams chat option to exchange messages with the sales representative.

4. Click Chat to open Teams. You will see a team named for the account and a channel named for the opportunity. Post a conversation in the channel to message any internal stakeholders with your questions or comments.
5. Click Take Notes to open the OneNote notebook associated with the account. You will see sections and pages for opportunities and orders.

Payment Terms and Tax Group

Before generating orders, you should check that the Account has the payment terms and correct currency selected.

1. From the Opportunity, click Account.
2. Under the Details tab, look at the Profile section. If the Payment Terms and Tax Group fields are not filled in, click in the field and press Enter to see a list. Select the appropriate term for each.
3. Click Save.
4. Close the account by clicking the X in the upper right corner. You will return to the Opportunity.

If you generate the order without the Payment Terms and Tax Group selected, the invoice will be incorrect. Should this happen, you will have to delete the order and re-generate the order once the payment terms and tax group are filled in.

Delete an Order

You generated an order. Now you realize you forgot to check the Tax Group and Payment Schedule. What to do?

1. Click the Order Name (number).

2. From the drop down menu in the ribbon (at the top of the page), select Delete.

You will see a confirmation message.

The order is deleted. Related invoices, subscriptions and revenue will also be removed.

You can also find the order in the Orders list under Subscriptions. Select the order and delete it.

Generate the Order

Once you are satisfied with the sale and ready to proceed, the next steps will produce the order, invoice, subscription and revenue for the sale.

1. In the Opportunity, click Generate Order.

Note: Depending on the product, order generation may occur automatically. This is pre-configured in the product as Auto Create Orders.

2. Click OK to generate the order, invoice, subscription and revenue for the opportunity.

The order number appears in the Order field on the Opportunity.

Note: The system takes a few minutes to generate the related records for the order. Although you can see the order number, the other items are still in process.

3. From the Orders list, click the Order number to open it. You will see tabs with information relating to this order: General, Billing, Products & Services, Opportunities, Invoices and Related.

General – This tab, above, shows general information about the order.

Billing – Details for billing are shown here including a field for the PO number, if required.

Products & Services – You will see details of the product or services on the sale under this tab.

You will see a Product Contact in this form also. This defaults from the Primary Contact but could be a particular contact to whom all communications about Products and Services are directed.

Opportunities - Related opportunities are listed here including renewals.

Invoices - When you click the Invoices tab, you will see a list of invoices for this order.

Click the invoice to see more information. Here you can change tax group, payment terms and due date, if needed. You will see Total Tax and Total Amount with Tax.

Related - This displays the Audit History which presents a full list of changes made to the account including the date, time, and user who made the changes.

Send the Invoice

Now that the invoice is generated, you can review it, get it ready to send, and send it. You can get it ready to send from the invoice in the Opportunity or from the Invoices section as described below.

1. From the Revenue area, go to the Invoices section on the left navigation. The list view defaults to New Invoices. Find your new invoice here.
2. Click the Invoice to open it. You can review it again here.
3. If you are satisfied with the invoice details (fields correct, dates correct, invoice lines correct), change the Status Reason from New to Ready to Send.

4. Ensure the Billing Contact information is complete, and correct.
5. Change the list view to Invoices Ready to Send.
6. Select the invoice (or invoices) you want to send and click Send Invoice(s).

7. Select the template from the drop down list.

8. Click Send Selected Invoice(s). The message disappears.

• an email record in Outlook
• a Timeline record in the Account, and Contact
• an invoice copy in Invoices folder

9. Confirm the invoice was sent:

1. At any of the above-mentioned locations, check for the records of your sent invoice(s).
2. From the Invoices list, change the view to Sent to Customer.

10. Return to the Account record and click Documents

11. Click the Invoices folder link to see the invoices listed.

12. Click an invoice link to see a copy of the invoice that was sent.

Review Subscription History and Revenue

1. From the Order, click the Products & Services tab and then click the product name.
2. Click the History tab. In this example you can see that the quantity change is reflected in the example order amounts. The first two orders were co-terminated and totaled 12. The renewal only required 11.

3. Click the Revenue tab to see how the revenue received will be recognized. See Recognize Your Subscription Revenue for more information.

Revenue Categorization

Revenue is categorized by customer classification. These include New Customer, Existing Customer, and Renewal. When a Renewal has an increase or a decline in quantity, it is categorized as Renewal Quantify Increase or Decrease. When a renewal has a price change, it is categorized as Renewal Price Increase or Decrease. Should a customer decide not to renew a product, that is categorized as Lost Product unless they have no other products with us. Then the loss is categorized as Attrition.

Here is a breakdown of revenue types attached to the Order Line.