You may or may not carry inventory in your business. Maybe you're a broker and just sell to your customers from 3rd party providers. Or you might carry inventory but also sell products which you do not normally stock. Metalsmith easily handles sales from both inventory and 3rd parties. When you start to enter a product description in the Order, Metalsmith will display a list of matches based on what you have typed so far. These products may be from inventory OR from 3rd party orders in the past. You can tell by looking at the last 2 characters on each product. Those characters indicate the Warehouse the product lives in. If it says "BO" then the product is a 3rd party item purchased earlier. Otherwise, it is an inventory item. The two columns of numbers for each product indicate how many items are available in inventory and how many items are on order. If Metalsmith does not find a match it assumes that the product is one which will be purchased from a 3rd party.
For 3rd party products (called Buy Outs in Metalsmith), you are required to provide some information about the product. This information will be used to properly price the item (by units, length, area, width) and to generate the purchase order at the end of the process.
You can create orders in which all items are from inventory or all are 3rd party products or a mixture of both. For 3rd party products Metalsmith will automatically generate the Purchase Order(s) needed. Once you have entered all the items of a Quote and you want to turn it into an Order, click the "Convert To Order" label at the top of the screen. Any outstanding issues (not enough inventory and items from a 3rd party) will need to be resolved before the conversion can occur. In the case of not enough inventory, you would need to specify whether to ship all or part of the existing inventory or just back order the entire amount. For 3rd party orders, you would need to enter pricing and shipping information for the purchase ( as seen below). You are able to have a single or multiple vendors for items on one order. Once you resolve all the issues, Metalsmith with save the Order and generate all the Purchase Orders needed to fulfill the order.
