Managing Item Fulfillments for sales, transfers, and returns
I mentioned earlier that a Sales Order is not a posting transaction, and that's because, as per most modern accounting standards, the sale is not final until the goods or services that were sold are delivered to the buyer. For physical goods, we record that event in the system via Item Fulfillments. These are relatively simple transactions with a copy of the items list from our Sales Order, for those items that are configured as fulfillable and for which we have inventory in stock.
There are a lot of variations to this process, depending on the company and how they deliver their goods to customers, but generally, some time after the sale is made, the goods are sent to the customer, drop-shipped, or manufactured and then shipped or similar. We can tell the system which items were delivered, and for warehouse-based companies, we can assign statuses such as Picked, Packed, and Shipped to track each step of the process...