A customer calls. Everything after that hangs on one job.

Master data first, then it goes quickly

At the centre are customers, suppliers and articles. Contacts, addresses, terms, prices and documents sit where they are needed. Every person is created once and used everywhere, instead of lying scattered across spreadsheets, mailboxes and folders.

Each article carries several supply sources with purchase price, minimum quantity and lead time. That speeds up procurement and turns a price comparison into a glance rather than a research job.

Terms can be held per customer, customer group, article and article group. They take effect in the quotation without anyone having to remember the arrangement.

Free attributes add whatever else your company wants to record, with no programming needed.

The job is the working document

When an enquiry comes in, a quotation is built from it: line items, quantities, prices, your own opening and closing texts. If it is accepted, conversion turns it into the order and the reference is kept. Nothing is lost at the handover, and everyone works from the same state, even with several people on it at once.

If the scope changes, the quotation continues in a new version. The previous state is kept on the job as a revision.

Traffic lights show per line item and per job whether availability and procurement add up. If something is short, a purchase suggestion to the supplier comes out of it instead of a query to the warehouse.

After goods receipt comes picking, line by line and confirmable by barcode. The delivery note comes out of the order, and part deliveries, cancellations and returns act on stock and invoice.

And then the job goes deeper

On the money side it continues on the same job. Invoices are created in full, in parts or collectively, a down payment can be posted in advance and converted into a down payment invoice, and the closing invoice comes at the end. Incoming payments and open items hang on it, and dunning where needed.

That sounds like classic inventory management at first, and at this point that is exactly what it should be. Before software can do extraordinary things, it has to handle the daily business reliably.

The difference shows as soon as your company gets more complex. Perhaps the article is not only sold but installed at the customer. Perhaps a technician has to be scheduled. Perhaps it is rented rather than sold, built to order, serviced regularly. Perhaps it needs a driver, a vehicle and a route.

Then the original order does not have to move into another system. It simply goes deeper: an ordinary order becomes a project, a rental, a production run, a service call or a route. Customers, articles, purchasing, quotation, order, warehouse, delivery, invoice. Only built so that it does not have to stop there.