Quote and Invoice Management in our Retailer POS software was re-imagined a while back, and the changes came straight from customer requests. Two stand out: you can now reserve stock against a quote or invoice, and special customer orders now live inside the same facility instead of off to one side.
Quote and Invoice Management is a set of tools in the software used often by produce / farm supply businesses, computer shops, garden centres, irrigation businesses and others.
Here is the problem Quote and Invoice Management solves. A customer asks for a price on a bike, or a piece of jewellery, or a pallet of feed. You quote it. They go away and think. They come back, pay a deposit, and expect the goods to be there when promised. The most common failure in that gap is selling the stock to someone else, and every retailer who handles quotes has made that phone call at least once. It is not a fun call.
Reserving stock ends it. When a customer commits, the items are held against their order, and your team can see what is reserved and for whom before anything goes out the door.
Proforma invoices are the other new term worth knowing. A proforma sits between a quote and a final invoice. The customer has committed, payments can be taken against it, stock can be reserved or ordered, and the final invoice comes later. Deposits, lay-by style arrangements and special orders all fit this naturally.
On special customer orders: existing ones convert to proforma invoices when you move to Retailer 3.3. There is a migration log under Utilities so you can check exactly what came across. Orders already collected or cancelled before the upgrade are left alone. New special orders are created from the POS screen or by ALT+T, and from there they follow the same process as everything else.
Searching is better too. The Find Customer Invoices screen covers every quote, proforma and invoice, searchable by customer, status, dates or totals. You can also search by stock item, which earns its place the first time a supplier tells you a product is delayed and you need to know which customers are waiting on it.
Step-by-step advice for the whole process is in our Knowledge Base, with training videos for each stage, and our support team will help you get started.
We built this because customers asked for it. That is how good software should get made.
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