The sales process includes work orders, loadout tickets, and invoices.

Work orders are used to provide product and pricing information to a customer who inquires about your products or services, or to make product, service, or pricing commitments.

Loadout tickets are used to record that a customer has received products or services but is not being invoiced immediately.

Invoices are used to bill the customer for products or services received.

Work orders are often optional and loadout tickets are always optionally part of the process. Using work orders or loadout tickets depend on your business processes. For example, you may choose to create work orders and invoices, but no loadout tickets; or you may choose to create invoices without creating work orders or loadout tickets.

Information from work orders can be pulled into loadout tickets or invoices, and information from loadout tickets can be pulled into invoices, as shown by the figure above. Pulling information into these different transactions helps you save time and prevent errors by not having to re-enter the data from one type of transaction to another.

All three types of documents can have any number of products (inventory or non-inventory), services, or blends.