Order to Cash
Keep one customer order connected from confirmation to payment.
Let the order desk, operations and accounts follow the same commercial chain, so dispatch, invoice and payment context do not become separate stories.
The record that movesOne confirmed customer order
OwnerOrder desk
- OrderA person does thisHowever it arrived, entered once.
- ConfirmationA person decidesSomebody confirms it can be promised.
Handoff
- What moves
- Confirmed order and fulfilment details
- What must be true
- The order is confirmed for fulfilment
- What changes hands
- Operations becomes responsible for what happens next
- What can stop it
- Stock, delivery or another order exception still needs attention
OwnerOperations
- DispatchA business event happensRecorded against that order.
Handoff
- What moves
- Order and dispatch context
- What must be true
- The relevant fulfilment event has happened and is recorded
- What changes hands
- Accounts can work from the same commercial chain
- What can stop it
- Invoice or payment information still needs review
OwnerAccounts
- InvoiceA person does thisRaised in the accounting process.
- PaymentA business event happensRecorded or matched when it arrives.
Confirmation is a handoff, not the end of order processing.
Taking the order, checking it and confirming it is a subject of its own, and the Order Management pillar owns all of it. What happens at the moment of confirmation is this page.
Owned by Order Management
- Taking the order from whichever channel it arrived on
- Checking price, stock, credit and delivery
- Getting whatever approval the order needs
- Confirming it to the customer
What confirmation starts
- Another team now has work to do
- That work should read from the order, not from a retyped copy
- What was promised becomes something operations has to meet
Operations should receive the order, not a rewritten instruction.
A rewritten instruction is a second version of the truth. The things below are what the warehouse actually needs from the order it is working to.
Example
- Order reference
- SO-2087
- Customer
- Kamath Traders
- Items and quantity
- As confirmed on the order
- Delivery context
- Where and by when, as agreed
- Current exception
- Anything open, if there is one
Who is asking about that order, and what each of them needs to be told, belongs to Order Status Tracking.Order Status Tracking
Dispatch is a business event, and the chain should record it.
Not a status somebody remembers to change, and not an accounting entry. Something happened in the warehouse, and the order it happened against is the thing that connects it to everything after.
A business event happens
Dispatch recorded against the order
DN-2087, against SO-2087
Example event
What the event makes possible
- Accounts can see that the fulfilment step has happened
- The invoice has a business event to follow, rather than a date somebody chose
- Anyone asking later can see when it moved, and against which order
Recording the dispatch does not post anything to your accounting system. It records what happened, so the next step has something to work from.
The invoice should still point back to the commercial chain.
An invoice that nobody can connect to an order is a figure without a story. The connection is what makes a later question answerable.
Where the accounting system is connected, invoice status can remain visible against the same customer and order context.
What stays answerable
- Which order the invoice relates to
- Which customer, and which of their orders
- What was dispatched before it
What this is not
- The invoice is not generated automatically because a dispatch was recorded
- Nothing here posts an accounting entry
- Tax treatment is not calculated, checked or guaranteed by this process
Payment belongs to the same story.
The last stage of the commercial cycle is the one furthest from where it started, which is exactly why the connection has to be deliberate.
Once payment is recorded or matched in the accounting process, the business should be able to trace what customer order it relates to.
What this does not mean
- Payment is not made by this process
- Bank transactions are not reconciled here
- There is no live bank feed and no real-time balance
- An account position is a reading of connected sources, not a live accounting ledger
An exception should pause a stage, not erase the history.
Each of these is a normal thing that happens. The question is whether the chain still holds afterwards.
Part dispatch
Some of the order has moved and some has not. Both halves still belong to it.
Dispatch delayed
The promised date and the actual one are different, and somebody will be asked why.
Invoice not yet recorded
The goods have gone. The commercial record has not caught up.
Payment status not yet available
Where the accounting system is connected, this is a gap in time rather than a gap in the story.
None of these is a failure of the process. Losing the connection while one of them is open would be.
The question that tests it
If somebody starts from the payment, can they find out what happened before it?
Forwards is the easy direction. Every process looks connected going forwards. Backwards is where a broken chain shows.
Example trace
Payment
Which invoice was this against?
INV-2087
INV-2087
What was invoiced, and which order was it for?
SO-2087
SO-2087
Was it dispatched, and when?
DN-2087
SO-2087
Who confirmed it, and what was promised?
The order, and the customer it belongs to
Four questions, each answered by the record before it. A business that cannot walk back up that chain answers these questions from memory instead.
A connected process does not mean automatic accounting.
This page shows how the commercial records can stay connected. It does not mean invoices are posted, payments are made or bank transactions are reconciled automatically. Those steps depend on the accounting systems and process in use.
- Where accounting is connected, status can be visible. Where it is not, it cannot.
- Connected systems are not continuously synchronised. How current a figure is depends on how often it is updated.
- Every stage on this page still has a person or a business event behind it.
Where the detail lives
This page is about the chain. Each page below owns one part of it properly.
- Order ManagementTake the order, check it, confirm it and track it.
- Order Approval WorkflowWhat needs an approval before an order can be confirmed.
- Order Status TrackingWho is asking where the order is, and what each of them needs.
- Customer-specific PricingWhere the price on the order comes from.
- Dealer Credit ControlThe account position behind a credit decision.
Where does your commercial chain break?
Tell us how an order becomes an invoice and a payment today, and we will help you find the link that goes missing.