Business to business
In a B2B scenario typically the payment is performed after the goods have been delivered or services have been performed.
Two main scenarios can be distinguished:
- One shot purchasing (Purchase Orders)
- Recurring purchases (Blanket Orders)
A good example is how office supply companies work. They'll let you choose from an online product catalog and have the goods delivered at the company you work for.
The invoice can either be delivered together with the goods or send at a later time.
The purchasing process depends from company to company but typically following cases are mainstream:
- Head of department or individual employee orders goods directly
- Purchases are centralized in purchasing groups which orders goods
The difference between both is that in the latter case the purchasing is more powerfull as they spend more time selecting proper vendors, negotiating better prices and follow up of correctness of the purchase invoices. This department invokes the purchase by creating an internal purchase order document and uses the document number as a reference when ordering. This reference is displayed on the purchase order invoice so the purchase department can easily track back the initial purchase order document.
Some customers require that the invoice also mentions additional purchase related information such as purchase responsible, department name, ... Hence is such a scenario the sales order document should allow us to store PO related customer information.
The shipment address is in both cases usually different from the purchasing address.
From an e-commerce perspective it is possible that the customer negotiates a price agreement which influences the price of goods and other costs to be displayed. The agreement can vary from discount on specific products, volume based discounts, reduction in handling and shipment fees, ... These should be taken into account when the sales order and invoice are created.
#Recurring purchases (Blanket orders)
See Wikipedia Blanket Order for now.