How to Accelerate Sales Order Management on Salesforce

Dealing with complex financial processes and manual work is a big challenge whether you are an enterprise or a small business. Conveniently, the Salesforce platform makes your work easier with automation, including your financial processes. 

Automation of accounting and finance on Salesforce accelerates your processes such as sales orders, invoices, revenue recognition, cash management and VAT to reduce your manual workload, and allow you to spend more time on other business processes such as making strategic decisions.

Salesforce’s automation capabilities offer comprehensive solutions for managing customer relationships and operational workflows. Whether you’re handling sales orders or optimising cash flow management, Salesforce’s automation tools provide agility and efficiency to achieve sustainable business success.

In this article, you will find out how to make sales order management more efficient in Salesforce, which is important for ensuring customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and effective revenue management.

What is Sales Order Management?

In simple terms, a sales order is a document the seller generates upon receiving a buyer’s purchase order specifying the details about the product or service. They can later be converted into a sales invoice. Sales order management helps streamline the sales process, maintain accurate records, and facilitate seamless communication between sales, inventory, and accounting departments. It is the process from order to collection, which includes receiving orders, delivering goods or services, and collecting payments. Effective sales order management increases customer satisfaction, by ensuring orders are processed correctly and delivered on time. Streamlined processes and automation reduce any errors that may occur during the manual sales orders process and save time. It also improves cash flow through better invoicing and payment tracking, while ensuring all orders are processed and fulfilled correctly.

Sales order management provides data insights and reporting, allowing businesses to analyse sales trends, customer preferences, and order history; this helps in strategic decision-making and tracking key performance indicators such as order fill rates. 

How Does Sales Order Management Work in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, businesses can maximise their efficiency by automating their sales order processes. Sales order management in Salesforce eliminates manual processes, speeds up work, prevents errors, and ensures that orders can be fulfilled quickly and accurately.

With a comprehensive accounting system that you can integrate into your Salesforce platform, you can digitise your sales order processing procedures and quickly turn opportunities into sales. With accounting in Salesforce, order and line item details are automatically recorded in your sales order. Businesses can easily view the inventory levels by warehouse by product across multiple locations and allocate existing stock to process their orders efficiently. Users can quickly see order summaries at a glance, what’s been ordered, what needs to happen and what needs to be shipped. And then you can manage and track the shipping process with a few simple clicks.

Create Sales Orders Effortlessly

Accounting on Salesforce allows you to create Sales Orders effortlessly. You can use various methods to create sales orders in Salesforce to accelerate your processes. With finance processes streamlined in Salesforce, users can enter customer information only once and automatically create sales orders from your existing opportunities, quotes, customer accounts or sales tab. The order automatically flows to fulfilment, invoicing, revenue recognition and accounting to save you staff hours and costs. Additionally, Salesforce’s Flow automates the creation of sales orders when specific criteria are met, such as when a quote is accepted or when an opportunity reaches a certain stage.

Streamline Invoicing and Revenue Recognition

Automated sales order management systems facilitate the generation of accurate invoices based on the sales orders. This integration ensures that all billing information is correct, reducing disputes and accelerating payment collection. Additionally, revenue recognition is automatically aligned with delivered products or services, maintaining compliance with accounting standards.

Automate Sales Order Management

Give sales and finance teams a fully integrated environment for processing sales orders, and managing warehouses, inventory and shipping. Gain complete visibility into inventory at all locations, instantly access available quantities, reserve inventory and fulfil orders with streamlined workflows. Improve collaboration between departments and ensure a seamless customer experience from order placement to delivery.

Gain Real-time Insights to Your Sales Order Fulfilment Rates

Use Salesforce’s custom objects or fields to track the status of sales orders throughout the fulfilment process. This visibility enables sales reps and customers to monitor progress and anticipate delivery dates. Sales and finance teams work with real-time reports and dashboards with a single set of customer information. Track your order status, fulfilment rates, sales numbers, and inventory quantities anywhere in Salesforce or any device.

Enhance Customer Experience

Inefficient business operations caused by disconnected systems for sales, finance, and inventory management, create information silos. Effective sales order management ensures seamless integration with supplier purchasing, providing real-time visibility into supply chain statuses. This capability enables sales teams to resolve queries and issues promptly without delays caused by departmental communications. With unified business operations in Salesforce, teams can access a 360-degree view of customer information and respond to any queries they need to answer. Proactively knowing order statuses and potential delays empowers sales teams to offer accurate information, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction through transparent communication. A unified platform integrating sales, finance, and inventory data streamlines operations, accelerates sales processes, and minimises operational inefficiencies and delays.

Additionally, customers are likely to expedite payments When they are informed about their existing orders, delivery or unpaid invoices. This helps in faster cash collection and ensures timely order processing. 

You can also accelerate sales order management by utilising these great features of Salesforce;

• Enable Collaboration

  Utilise Salesforce Chatter or Slack to facilitate collaboration among sales teams, operations, and customer support regarding sales orders. This real-time communication reduces turnaround times and improves decision-making.

• Enable Mobile Access

  Utilise the Salesforce Mobile App to empower sales reps to manage and track sales orders anytime and anywhere. Mobile access ensures that orders can be processed promptly, even when your sales reps are in the field.

• Automate Email Notifications

  Set up Flow to automatically send email notifications to stakeholders like customers, and sales reps, at key stages of the sales order process, such as order confirmation and delivery.

• Enhance Reports and Dashboards

  Create custom reports and dashboards in Salesforce to gain insights into sales order metrics, such as order cycle time, conversion rates, and pending orders. This data-driven approach enables continuous process improvement.

• Integrate with Accounting Systems

  Unify your CRM, Accounting and Finance with a comprehensive accounting system to synchronise sales order data seamlessly. Automate financial processes like invoicing and revenue recognition within Salesforce. This integration reduces manual data entry and ensures data consistency across systems. You can check AppExchange to find the best finance solution for your business.

In conclusion, leveraging Salesforce for sales order management offers significant advantages through automation and productivity. Businesses streamline operations, reduce errors, and automate and accelerate sales order management processes. In Salesforce, users can automatically create sales orders from your existing opportunities, quotes, customer accounts or sales tab. With accounting in Salesforce, you can provide sales and finance teams with a fully integrated environment to process sales orders and manage warehouses, inventory, and shipping. Additionally gain full visibility into inventory across all locations, instantly access available quantities, reserve inventory, and fulfil orders with streamlined workflows. By utilising the Salesforce collaboration tool, you can improve collaboration between departments and deliver a seamless customer experience from order placement to delivery.