A Sales Order records what a customer buys in Business Central. It posts in two steps: the shipment reduces inventory, the invoice creates the receivable.
A sales order is the document used to sell items or services when delivery and invoicing do not necessarily happen at the same moment. The header carries the customer and the shipping and invoicing terms, the lines carry items, quantities and prices. Unlike a sales invoice, an order supports partial shipment, partial invoicing and reservation of inventory against the line.
Search for Sales Orders with Alt+Q to open the list, then use New to create one. The related setup sits in Sales & Receivables Setup, which controls the number series, the default posting date behaviour and the credit limit warning. Each line shows item availability, and posting is done from the Post action with the options Ship, Invoice, or Ship and Invoice.
Customer C00030 orders 12 units of item 1928-S on 3 March 2026 at CHF 480.00 each, requested delivery 17 March. Only 8 are ready, so you set Qty. to Ship to 8 and post Ship on 10 March, which creates a posted sales shipment and item ledger entries for 8 units. You then invoice those 8 units, CHF 3,840.00 before VAT, which lands on the customer ledger. The remaining 4 units stay open on the order.
The most frequent mistake is leaving Qty. to Ship and Qty. to Invoice at the full quantity and posting Ship and Invoice when only part of the order is ready, which invoices goods that never left. Changing the Sell-to Customer No. after lines exist recalculates prices and discounts, so quoted amounts silently change. Deletion is blocked while quantities are shipped but not invoiced, and posting fails if the posting date falls in a closed accounting period or outside the user's allowed posting dates.
Orders that are shipped but not invoiced are the usual source of a gap between inventory movements and revenue, so filter the list on the shipped-not-invoiced quantity at each period end. Zentriq Agent, our assistant inside Business Central, answers that kind of question in plain language over your live data, and when it proposes a change to a document the change stays a draft that a person approves in Business Central.
A sales invoice ships and invoices in a single posting and cannot be delivered in parts. A sales order stays open until every quantity has been shipped and invoiced, so use it whenever delivery and invoicing are separate events.
Business Central blocks deletion while quantities are shipped but not invoiced, because the goods have already left stock. Post the remaining invoice first; fully invoiced orders are removed later by the Delete Invoiced Sales Orders batch job.
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