Understanding Sales Order Header Information

When you create a sales order, you must enter header and detail information. The header information pertains to the entire order, and includes:

• Billing address.

• Currency code and exchange rate.

• Payment terms and payment instrument.

• Order hold codes.

• Order dates.

The sales order header also contains information about how the system processes a sales order, such as billing instructions and delivery dates.

Most of the remaining header information, such as tax code and area, shipping address, and freight information, consists of default values from the F0101 table and the customer master billing instructions that are stored in the F03012 table.

Additionally, if the alternate tax rate/area assignment functionality is enabled for the company, the system assigns the tax rate/area based on the ship-to and branch/plant country information from the F40081 table instead of the tax rate/area from F03012 table.

During order header entry, you can review and change the values that apply to a specific order. However, to change the information that the system retrieves for future orders, you must update the information in the master tables. The only header information that you cannot change is the order keys, which include the order number, order type, and order company. This information uniquely identifies the sales order record.

In addition to the header information that you enter, you can create a message and attach it to a sales order so that when you print the sales order the message appears in the order header area.

Before you enter sales order header or detail information, you must first set the processing options for the P4210 program.