Order Management Process with Sales Channels

The Sales Channel Allocation feature enables planners to save inventory and future supplies to sales orders in these channels. Order reservation works as a virtual container that enables you to save multiple sources of supply for a specific group of future demands.

Supplies are set aside by the means of allocations to order reservations. The allocations are governed by the allocation strategy assigned to each reservations. This helps you to ensure that supplies are saved for high priority customers.

Assign Opportunities and Estimates to a Sales Channel

NetSuite lets you create an opportunity record to indicate sales items your customers are interested in. For more information, see Creating an Opportunity Record.

In NetSuite, you can create an estimate and then print, email, or fax it to your customer. Then when your customer accepts it, you can make any necessary changes and convert it to a sales order, invoice, or cash sale. For more information, see Preparing an Estimate.

Assign Sales Orders and Cash Sales to a Sales Channel

When you create a sales order, cash order, or an invoice, you can specify a sales channel to use for the order. The system can then report orders by sales channel.

If an order was converted from an opportunity or an estimate, the sales channel field is automatically populated.

Reallocate Supplies Between Reservations and Channel Sales Orders

To identify which sources the target order can reallocate supply from, clear the target order Can Only Use Dedicated Order reservation As Supply box. The customer order line then appears as a target order.

NetSuite provides suggested target orders sources you can take existing allocations from, such as order reservations and sales orders. After you accept a recommendation, the reallocations are executed and the order is fully allocated.

Supply Order Allocated Demand

NetSuite helps you to check that supply lines are not allocated to sales orders when a supply order has an allocation to an order reservation. The Allocated Demand popup window displays the following information:

The order reservation number and allocated quantity.
The sales order number, allocated quantity, and order reservation number.

Supply Order Allocated Supply

When a sales order has channel-bound allocations, the Allocated Supply popup window displays the following information:

The source of supply, quantity, allocated quantity, and supply date for each allocation.
The order reservation from which the supply line was allocated to the sales order.

Sales Channel Reporting

NetSuite enables you to produce reports that display order to cash transactions by product group and by sales channel. This information helps you to manage your available supplies. Creating order to cash reports by sales channel provides understanding into your multi-channel sales operation. All order to cash reports display sales channel information from sales transactions. A channel is a category of orders that can be differentiated by customer type or distribution channel, such as web-shop or retail outlet. For example, you can view reports for sales by channel, backorders by channel, item profitability by channel, or ad-hoc lists by channel.

Saved Search by Sales Channel

You can also add a sales channel to a custom search based on transaction records. For example, in the beginning of the new year, you may want to review pre-holiday orders that require immediate attention.