Sales order

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The Sales Order, sometimes abbreviated as SO, is an order issued by a business to a customer. A sales order may be for products and/or services. Given the wide variety of businesses, this means that the orders can be fulfilled in several ways. Broadly, the fulfillment modes, based on the relationship between the order receipt and production, are as follows:

  • Digital Copy - Where PRICES are digital and inventory is maintained with a single digital master. Copies are made on demand in real time and instantly delivered to customers.
  • Build to Stock - Where products are built and stocked in anticipation of demand. Most products for the consumer would fall into this category
  • Build to Order - Where products are built based on orders received. This is most prevalent for custom parts where the designs are known beforehand.
  • Configure to Order - Where products are configured or assembled to meet unique customer requirements e.g. Computers
  • Engineer to Order - Where some amount of product design work is done after receiving the order

A sales order is an internal document of the company, meaning it is generated by the company itself. A sales order should record the customer's originating purchase order which is an external document. Rather than using the customer's purchase order document, an internal sales order form allows the internal audit control of completeness to be monitored as a sequential sales order number can be used by the company for its sales order documents. The customer's PO is the originating document which triggers the creation of the sales order. A sales order, being an internal document, can therefore contain many customer purchase orders under it. In a manufacturing environment, a sales order can be converted into a work order to show that work is about to begin to manufacture, build or engineer the products the customer wants.

Electronic Sales Order

Many Sales Order are no longer paper-based, but rather transmitted electronically over a corporate Intranet. These Sales Orders may be communicated across different Enterprise Business Applications.

Open Application Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) from OAGi

Use of XML message format for electronic Sales Order have occurred since the inception of XML in 1998. OAGIS has included a Sales Order since its inception in 1996. Implementations of Sales Orders based on OAGIS are common, including support by major enterprise business software vendors, as well as implementations by many of the worlds Fortune 500 companies.

OAGi has a working relationship with UN/CEFACT where OAGi and its members participate in defining many of the Technology and Methodology specifications. OAGi also includes support for these Technology and Methodology specifications within OAGIS.

While providing a Cross Industry representation of Sales Order, OAGIS specifies industry specific requirements for the Industries that work with OAGi to identify these requirements.

More information about OAGi, its members, Use Cases, access to OAGIS and more can be found on the OAGi Website http://www.oagi.org.

Common order types

  • Return order
  • Product Number
  • Rush Order

Customer order fulfillment

The steps involved in fulfilling the demands made in a sales order make up the order fulfillment process.

See also


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