Managing sales and contacts

This chapter covers the whole sales cycle: keeping the file of third parties, drawing up quotations, turning them into orders and triggering deliveries.

Managing contacts

In Odoo, contacts cover all third parties: customers, prospects, vendors, subcontractors, institutions. A single database feeds every app, which avoids parallel files and diverging addresses.

People and companies

A radio button at the top of the form, which carries no displayed label, distinguishes two kinds of contact:

• Company: a legal entity: business, association, public body.
• Person: a natural person. A person can be attached to a company: the Company field appears as soon as the Person type is selected.

This link builds the hierarchy of people within a single customer: the purchasing department, accounts payable, the technical manager.

Creating a contact

1. Open the Contacts app and click New.
2. Choose the type: Company or Person.
3. Fill in the name: this is the label that will appear everywhere in the database. The field is mandatory.
4. Complete the Address, the email address and the phone number.
5. Fill in the Tax ID, used for tax identification and for checking legal statements.
6. For a person, fill in the Job Position held.
7. Add Tags to classify the contact.
8. Save.

Adding people and addresses

A company generally has several people and several addresses: head office, delivery, invoicing.

1. Open the company record.
2. Select the Contacts tab.
3. Click Add Contact.
4. In the Create Contact window, choose the nature of the entry: - Contact: a named person, with their job position and their direct details; - Delivery: a delivery address; - Invoice: an invoicing address; - Other: any other address.
5. Save.

Entering the commercial conditions

The Sales & Purchase tab of the contact record carries the settings that will be applied automatically to its documents. It is split into blocks, three of which concern selling.

Sales, what is carried over onto quotations and orders.

Field	What it determines
Salesperson	The salesperson responsible for the account, carried over onto quotations and used as an analysis criterion.
Payment Terms	The credit period granted, which computes the due date of invoices.
Payment Method	The usual means of payment: transfer, direct debit, cheque.
Pricelist	The applicable price list, which determines the prices offered on their quotations (see section 9.6.1).
Delivery Method	The carrier and shipping mode used by default.

Fiscal Information: the Fiscal Position adapts taxes to the customer's regime: exemption, reverse charge, rate applicable in their country. It is what automatically substitutes the right tax for the product's own. How it works is detailed in section 12.2.4.

Misc: the contact's internal Reference, the Industry for segmentation, and the link to a Company in a multi-company environment.

Merging duplicates

1. Open the contact list in list view.
2. Tick the records to be merged.
3. Click Actions then Merge.
4. Designate the record to keep and confirm.

The document history of the absorbed records is carried over onto the record kept.

Configuring sales

1. Open Sales › Configuration › Settings.
2. Enable the options you need: - Quotation Templates: pre-configures recurring offers; - Default Quotation Validity: number of days after which an offer expires; - Online Signature: lets the customer accept the quotation from their browser; - Online Payment: allows a down payment to be made on acceptance; - Discounts: enables the discount column on the lines; - Margins: displays the margin on quotations; - Lock Confirmed Sales: prevents modification after confirmation; - Sale Warnings: displays a message during entry for a given customer or product; - Delivery Methods: enables the computation and invoicing of shipping costs; - Units of Measure & Packagings and Variants depending on the catalogue.
3. Save.

Invoicing policy

It determines the quantity Odoo carries over onto the customer invoice: the one that was ordered, or the one that was actually delivered.

The Invoicing Policy field in the settings sets the value used when a product record is created : Invoice what is ordered or Invoice what is delivered. The setting that actually applies is the one carried by each product, in its General Information tab below the product type: Ordered quantities or Delivered quantities.

Drawing up a quotation

Creating the quotation

1. Open Sales › Orders › Quotations.
2. Click New.
3. Select the Customer: their payment terms, their fiscal position and their pricelist apply automatically.
4. Check the Invoice Address and the Delivery Address, taken from the contact record and editable if delivery is made elsewhere.
5. Check the Quotation Date and the Expiration, beyond which the offer is no longer valid.
6. Add the product lines: quantity, unit price, discount if any.
7. Check the taxes and the total.
8. Save.

Using a quotation template

A template pre-fills a quotation with a set of items and conditions. It saves rebuilding recurring offers, and guarantees that the conditions announced are the same from one salesperson to the next.

1. Enable Quotation Templates in Sales › Configuration › Settings.
2. Open Sales › Configuration › Sales Orders › Quotation Templates and click New.
3. Name the template, then fill in: - the Quotation Validity, in days, which will compute the expiration date; - the Confirmation Mail sent automatically when the order is confirmed; - the Invoicing Journal, if sales of this kind are to be posted separately; - the Online Signature and the Online Payment, which take precedence over the general setting.
4. In the Lines tab, build the offer: Add a product for items, Add a section and Add a note to structure it.
5. In the Terms & Conditions tab, enter the text specific to this kind of offer.
6. Save.

On a new quotation, select the template: the lines, the conditions and the confirmation requirements apply. All that is left is to adjust quantities and prices to the case at hand.

Pricing with the quote calculator

Some offers are not built line by line: they are computed. A measurement to be converted into quantities, a scale with breaks, a formula combining area, difficulty coefficient and travel. The quote calculator answers this need by attaching a spreadsheet to the template.

1. On the quotation template, fill in the Quote calculator field with the spreadsheet to be used.
2. Build the pricing in it as you would in a spreadsheet: input cells, formulas, results.
3. Synchronise the result cells with the quotation fields, using the Sync with field command: the computed quantity will feed the corresponding order line.

On a quotation created from this template, a Quote calculator smart button opens a copy of the sheet, specific to that quotation. The salesperson enters the site data in it, and the computed quantities are carried over onto the lines.

Offering options

An option is not a separate line: it is a section of the order flagged as optional. The lines it contains drop to zero and become editable by the customer in the online quotation.

1. Open the quotation and add a section in the Order Lines tab, using Add a section.
2. Place in it the extras and alternatives the customer can choose.
3. On the section row, open the three-dot menu at the end of the row and choose Set Optional.

The quantities of the lines in the section then drop to zero, and the quotation total no longer counts them. When the customer views the quotation online, they adjust those quantities themselves with the + and − buttons; what they keep feeds the order.

Enriching the quotation PDF

A quotation can be accompanied by commercial documents assembled automatically into the PDF: cover page, company presentation, datasheets for the products offered, terms and conditions.

1. Enable PDF Quote builder in Sales › Configuration › Settings.
2. Open Sales › Configuration › Sales Orders › Headers/Footers.
3. Click New.
4. Fill in the Document Type: Header to place the document before the proposal, Footer to place it after.
5. Upload the PDF into the File Content (base64) field.
6. Restrict the scope if needed through the Quotation Templates: the document will only be offered on quotations drawn up from those templates. Left empty, it is offered everywhere.
7. Tick Add By Default so that it is attached from the outset to every new quotation, without having to select it.
8. To attach a datasheet to a specific product, open the product record, click the Documents smart button, and upload the PDF there: it will only be added to the quotation if that product appears on it.
9. On the quotation, open the dedicated tab to tick the documents to be included in the send.

The text areas of the PDFs uploaded can be fed with the quotation's data (customer name, amount, validity date, salesperson name) which personalises the document without editing the file on every send. The Form Fields Included field lists the areas detected in the file uploaded.

Sending the quotation

1. Click Preview to check the quotation as the customer will see it in their browser.
2. Click Send.
3. Check the recipient and the attached documents, personalise the message if needed.
4. Confirm the send.

The status of the quotation moves from Quotation to Quotation Sent, which distinguishes offers that have been sent from those still being prepared. The Print button generates the PDF without going through email.

Setting the terms and conditions

Terms and conditions are printed at the foot of quotations, orders and invoices. They are defined once for the whole company, in the accounting settings.

1. Open Accounting › Configuration › Settings.
2. Enable Default Terms & Conditions.
3. Choose the Terms & Conditions format: - Add a Note: the text is entered in the field that appears below and is printed in full at the foot of the documents; - Add a link to a Web Page: the documents carry a link to a page on your website, which the Update Terms button lets you write.
4. Save.

Turning the quotation into an order

Confirmation by the salesperson

1. Open the accepted quotation.
2. Click Confirm.

The document moves to the Sales Order status and the delivery order is created automatically in Inventory.

The delivery order is created in the Waiting or Ready status depending on whether the goods are available or not. It carries the Delivery Address from the order, a Scheduled Date computed from the lead times, and for each line the Demand quantity next to the Quantity actually picked.

Confirmation by the customer

The customer can accept the quotation themselves, from the link received by email, without the salesperson stepping in. Two requirements can be set for them, separately or together.

Set the default behaviour in Sales › Configuration › Settings:

• Online Signature: the customer draws their signature in the browser;
• Online Payment: the customer pays all or part of the amount;
• Prepayment percentage: the share to be paid for the order to be confirmed. At one hundred, the quotation is paid in full; at thirty, a 30% down payment is enough.

These settings set the value carried over onto new quotations. Each quotation then carries them in its Other Info tab, where they can be changed case by case: a small order can be confirmed on a signature alone, a large order can require a down payment.

What the customer sees. The quotation opens in their browser, with the detail of the lines and the attached documents. Depending on the requirements set, the acceptance button reads Accept & Sign, Accept & Pay or Sign & Pay.

What happens next. The quotation moves to the Sales Order status, the salesperson is notified in the chatter, and the document keeps a record of the agreement: the image of the Signature, the name of the signatory in Signed By and the timestamp in Signed On. When a payment is required, the transaction is attached to the order and the down payment gives rise to an invoice.

Modifying a confirmed order

1. Open the order.
2. Modify the lines concerned, or add some.
3. Save.

Odoo passes the change on to logistics, without your having to touch the delivery order.

Delivering

Validating the delivery

1. Open the sales order.
2. Click the Delivery smart button.
3. Check the products and the quantities.
4. Click Validate.

In a multi-step warehouse, validate the picking first, then move on to the shipping step using the Next Transfer button.

Delivering partially

Enter the quantities actually shipped and validate, then accept the creation of the backorder. The delivery status of the order stays partial until the balance is shipped.

Pricing and discounting

Pricelists

The pricelist assigned to the customer applies automatically to every new line. Building the lists is described in chapitre 9.

Discounts

Three levels coexist:

• Line discount: entered directly in the Disc.% column of a line.
• Global discount: applied to the total of the quotation.
• Automatic discount: coming from a pricelist rule, triggered by quantity, amount or product category.

Analysing sales

1. Open Sales › Reporting › Sales.
2. Choose the Measures to display: revenue, quantities, margin.
3. Cross by customer, product, salesperson, team or period with Group By.
4. Save recurring analyses in Favorites to come back to them in one click.

Granting a discount

Discounts require the Discounts option to be enabled in the Pricing block of Sales › Configuration › Settings. Without it, neither the discount column nor the button described below appears.

Discounting one line

Enter a rate in the Disc.% column of the line concerned. This is the route to take when the discount only covers certain items.

Discounting the whole quotation

The Discount button, below the lines, opens a window where you enter a rate in the Discount field, then choose one of three options before clicking Apply.

Option	What it does to the document
On All Order Lines	Writes the rate into the Disc.% column of every line. No line is added: the quotation shows the discounted price item by item.
Global Discount	Adds discount lines at the end of the quotation carrying the rate in their label: for example Discount 5%. The item lines are not modified.
Fixed Amount	Does the same with a set amount instead of a percentage. The label of the line created is simply Discount.

Example of a full cycle

Good practice