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Sales orders

Every sale in Masto Control is a sales order: one paper per customer order, with the products on it, the shipping, a discount if there was one, VAT, and what the channel charged for the sale. Whether it comes from the Sell button on a lot, a custom order or an order imported from Etsy or Shopify, it ends up on the Sales tab of Finished products as an order with a number.

Drafts and posted orders​

An order starts as a draft. A draft is just a paper: nothing has left the shelf, and it has no number yet. You can add products, change prices, pick a customer and come back to it later.

Posting the order is the sale. It takes the products off the shelf (oldest lot first, unless a line names a lot), takes the packaging once for the whole order, records the sale for analytics and reports, and gives the order the next number in the sequence - INV-0001, INV-0002 and so on, with no gaps. A quick sale from the Sell button and a custom order are posted on the spot.

Once posted, what the customer was invoiced is frozen: products, prices, discount, shipping charged, VAT and the customer cannot change. What can still change is your own side of it - the shipping cost you paid, the tracking number, the fees as they turned out on the channel's statement, and whether it has been paid. To change anything else, void the order and make a new one.

What is on an order​

  • Sales channel and customer. A marketplace is its own customer in the books - the money comes from Etsy, not from the buyer - so a channel can carry a default customer that fills in when an order names nobody. Masto Control keeps no buyer addresses or personal data from marketplaces.
  • Dates: the order date, the sale date (the invoice date, and the day it counts in reports), a due date for invoices that are paid later, and the day it shipped.
  • Products, each with a quantity, a unit price prefilled from the channel's price list, an optional line discount and its VAT rate.
  • Order discount, shipping charged (what the buyer paid for delivery) and the VAT rate the order starts with. Prices normally include VAT; switch it off for net prices.
  • Channel fees, worked out from the channel's fee schedule when the order is saved. Optional rules such as Etsy Offsite Ads are a checkbox. You can add fees by hand, and once the channel's statement arrives, tick From the statement to record what was actually charged.
  • Packaging, prefilled from the products' packaging for the channel and editable: three candles in one parcel use one box, not three.
  • Shipping cost - the postage or courier you paid, kept apart from what the buyer was charged.

The totals panel shows the items, discount, shipping, tax, the total the buyer paid, the fees, and the net payout - what should actually reach your account. For a marketplace that collects and remits sales tax itself, that tax is taken out of the payout too.

Paying and voiding​

Mark as paid records that the money arrived. Unpaid posted orders appear in the Receivables report, aged from their due date.

Void reverses a posted order. Revenue leaves analytics and reports either way; what you choose is whether the goods came back to stock - the products, their materials and the packaging - or were written off because the buyer kept them. A voided order keeps its number, so the sequence stays complete for the books.

Numbers and the books​

The numbering is gapless and assigned at posting, a posted order cannot be quietly edited, every order has a counterparty, and VAT is kept per line. These are the rules accounting systems and e-invoicing expect, so an order can be handed to a bookkeeper as it is - the Sales ledger exports exactly that.