Simplified Sales, Purchasing, and Packaging menus

Acctivate v12.3 removes some sales and purchasing entries from the Sales, Purchasing, and Packaging menus in favor of initiating these functions from the Sales Order Manager and Purchase Order Manager windows.

What's Changing with the menus in v12.3?

Some entries in the Sales, Purchasing, and Packaging menus are being removed.

• Sales -> Change Workflow Status
• Sales -> Print Quotes
• Sales -> Print Orders
• Sales -> Print Pick Tickets
• Sales -> Print Shipping Labels
• Sales -> Create Invoices
• Packaging -> Create Shipments
• Purchasing -> Print Issued Purchase Orders

Each of these entries opened a window that was used for filtering on sales or purchase orders for a specific action, such as printing.

Instead, you can filter and select sales and purchase orders in the Sales Order Manager and Purchase Order Manager windows, then apply one or more of the actions listed above.

See the table at the end of this article to learn more about the supported processes to use instead.

Why is this change being made?

Acctivate version 10.2 introduced the Sales Order Manager which offers greater flexibility in the filtering and selecting of sales orders for batch processing, such as printing quotes and orders, creating shipments, and creating invoices.

Since then, Acctivate has supported two ways to perform many batch processing tasks, like creating invoices:

• Use the rigid filtering options from the Sales, Purchasing, or Packaging menu
• Use the flexible filtering options and extended functionality of the Manager windows

Although the two options seemed similar, the Manager window's powerful filtering, sorting, and grouping features (both on the fly and through custom buttons) provide a much more flexible and user-friendly way to perform bulk actions.

The three primary advantages the Manager window offers as the starting point for performing these functions are:

1. Better filtering capabilities: The Print Quotes, Print Orders, Print Pick Tickets, Create Invoices, etc. windows only supported filtering on a limited number of fields and in most cases only one value per field was supported. The Sales Order Manager allows filtering on nearly all order header fields and multiple values per field can be supplied for filtering. 
2. Save time with custom buttons: Instead of manually filtering orders each time, create buttons that automatically find what you need. For example, if you invoice ACME Inc.'s shipped orders weekly, make a button showing only "Shipped" orders from ACME Inc. Then, just select all the orders and create invoices in one click!
3. Support for more features: The Print Quotes, Print Orders, Print Pick Tickets, Print Shipping Labels, and Print POs windows did not support emailing. The Manager windows support both printing and emailing. The Manager windows also support applying consecutive actions to selected orders; e.g., quickly print Pack Lists and then Create Shipments without needing to reselect orders.

What do you need to do to prepare for this change?

If you've been using the Sales Order Manager to print quotes, print orders, print pick tickets, prepare shipment, create invoices, and update workflow statuses then you don't need to change anything.

Likewise, if you're currently printing purchase orders from the Purchase Order Manager, then you also don't need to change your processes.

However, if you're relying on the Sales, Packaging, and Purchasing menu entries that are being removed, refer to the reference guide below to transition to the supported workflows.