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Create a Customer Order

Building an order for a customer who calls in, wants to set something aside, or is paying with a house account means you can ring it up and take payment properly — without needing them physically at a register. This guide walks you through creating COs!

Written by Help

Create a Customer Order

How Customer Orders Work

Access requirements. You'll need view access to the "Customers" permission for the "Customer orders" link to even appear in the left-menu bar, and view access to "Transactions" to actually open the page. Building or completing an order needs edit access to "Transactions"; assigning or changing the customer on it needs edit access to "Customers" specifically.

  • These are back-office orders, separate from POS and ecommerce. A customer order you create here is its own kind of order — distinct from a sale rung up on a terminal or one placed by a customer on your storefront.

  • Approving and completing are two separate, optional checkpoints. You can approve an order first as a checkpoint before taking payment, or skip straight from Draft to completing it — approving isn't required.

  • Tax-exempt status follows the customer while the order is still open. "Tax exempt" shows the customer's own tax-exempt setting — or an exemption they get from a customer group they belong to — and tax is calculated on that basis. Attaching a different customer resets it to that customer's status.

  • You can override it for this order, and completing the order locks it in. Toggling it yourself overrides that default, and it stays overridden until you change the customer. Completing the order locks in whichever answer was in effect, so later changes to the customer no longer affect a completed order's tax.

  • You can't change the customer once a house account payment is on the order. Once the order has a House Charge payment on it, the customer becomes locked — there's no way to reassign it to someone else from here.

Creating and Building the Order

Step 1

Click on "Customers" in the left-menu bar, then click on "Customer orders."

Step 2

On a multi-location account, make sure the store selector at the top is set to the right location, then click "New Order." This immediately creates a draft order and opens it for you to build.

Step 3

Under "Customer," search for the customer this order is for in the "Search customers" field — or click to add someone new if they're not in your system yet.

Step 4

In "Build order," use "Search products to add" to find items, and pick the right one from the results. Pressing Enter only adds an item automatically when what you typed is an exact SKU match — for anything else, including a product name, click the result you want.

Note: this search box is only available while the order is still in Draft. Once it's Approved, you can no longer add new items this way.

Step 5

Fill in "Customer Reference" and "Due Date" if they're useful for your own tracking — both are optional. Toggle "Tax exempt" if this order should be handled differently than the customer's default.

Step 6

When the order is ready, click "Approve order" to move it out of Draft — or skip ahead to Step 7 if you'd rather take payment right away.

Note: if approving would leave any item with negative stock, you'll see an "Insufficient inventory" warning listing the affected items. It's just a warning — click "Approve anyway" to proceed if that's intentional.

Step 7

Click "Mark as complete," choose a "Payment method," and click "Complete order."

Note: payment is recorded for the order's full total in one go — there's no way to split it across a partial payment and take the rest later.

Other Things You Can Do

  • Print a pick list or invoice — "Pick list" and "Invoice" buttons in the Build order section open printable views of the order.

  • Duplicate an order — from the "⋮" menu, click "Duplicate" to create a new draft copy of it.

  • Return items — from the "⋮" menu, click "Return items" once the order is complete. If it was paid by card, this only shows up when cross-tender refunds are enabled for your account — otherwise you'll see a disabled "Not returnable" option instead.

  • Delete an order — from the "⋮" menu, click "Delete." Only available while the order is Draft or Approved — not once it's Complete.

Troubleshooting

  • You can't change the customer on an order: check whether it has a completed house account payment — that locks the customer permanently, with no way to reassign it from here.

  • Delete doesn't do anything on an order you can see in the list: if "Show parked" is turned on, the list also includes orders parked at the POS terminal, not just ones created here — those aren't in a Draft or Approved state, so they can't be deleted from this screen.

  • Approving warns about negative stock: that's not a hard block — click "Approve anyway" if selling below zero stock is intentional, or adjust the quantities first if it isn't.

  • You need to take a partial payment: that's not supported here — completing the order records a single payment for the full total.

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