Generate Multiple Orders from a Single Quote

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Generate an order using the Create Order and Edit Order Products buttons.
• Manually split a quote into multiple order records.
• Define how Salesforce CPQ populates dates on orders and order products.
• Describe how bundles and Percent Of Total products contribute to order generation.

More Flexibility in Order Generation

As we explained in the last unit, checking the Ordered checkbox makes it easy to create an order. However, one order per quote may be too basic for some business use cases. For example, imagine you have a quote for a home security system. It includes a monitoring service that starts next month, and hardware that should be delivered as soon as possible. In this case, it would be very helpful to have two orders so they can be used for provisioning products at specific times.

Salesforce CPQ can handle that scenario with ease, as long as you enable Allow Multiple Orders, which is how your Salesforce CPQ-enabled org is already set up.

Let’s see what it takes to create two orders from an existing quote. You start by creating an order for the services that are provisioned in the future.

1. Click Accounts in the navigation bar.
2. Click Kevco Inc.
3. Click the Related tab.
4. From the Quotes related list, click Q-00022.
   This quote includes hardware for a home security system, as well as the Home Security Monitoring subscription product.
5. Click Create Order.
6. Click Save.
   At this point the order has been created, but it doesn’t have any order products related to it. Now you can choose exactly which quote lines to convert into order products.
7. Click Edit Order Products.
   You’ll find a list of potential products to include in this order. Since this order is for the services you want to start in the future, only include Home Security Monitoring.
   
8. Check the row for Home Security Monitoring.
9. Click Save.
   Salesforce CPQ is now creating an order product for Home Security Monitoring. You may need to refresh the page once or twice to get the order products related list to update.

The Create Order button allows you to specify things such as the start date and exactly which quote lines to include as order products. Meanwhile, Salesforce CPQ still copies over critical information, such as quantities and prices.

At this point, only part of your quote has been converted into an order. If you want to, you could use the Create Order button again to do the same steps you did to create your first order. However, since you know that the remainder of the quote should all go onto one final order, you can use the Ordered checkbox like you did in the last unit.

1. Click Quotes in the navigation bar.
2. Click Q-00022.
3. Click Edit.
4. Check the Ordered checkbox.
5. Click Save.
   Salesforce CPQ is smart enough to know to create a separate order with order products based on only unordered quote lines. For this reason, you only select the Ordered checkbox one time in the sales process: when you want all remaining unordered quote lines to go into a single order.
6. Click the Related tab.
   Notice there are now two orders in the Orders related list.
7. From the Orders related list, click the number of the second order.

The second order has the remaining three order products, and does not include Home Security Monitoring since it was already put into the first order. Nice work! You’ve split one quote into two orders.

The Edit Products Page

When you set up an org to allow multiple orders from a single quote, clicking the Edit Order Products button brings you to the Edit Products page. In the last example, you use this page to add only Home Security Monitoring to the first order. But you can use the Edit Products page to remove order products.

For example, if you want to remove an order product from the second order, you can click Edit Order Products, uncheck Home Security Installation, then save. Salesforce CPQ removes the order product so you can then add it to a different (or new) order.

The Edit Products page also makes splitting quantities of a single quote line easy. Imagine that a customer agrees to buy 100 boxes of copy paper, but only wants 20 of those boxes delivered immediately. When generating the first order, your Sales Ops team can use the Edit Products page to change the order product quantity to 20.

This leaves 80 boxes remaining for future orders. When the time comes to create another order, Salesforce CPQ knows that the customer has already ordered 20 boxes, so it displays an Available Quantity of 80.

If Sales Ops tries to set a quantity greater than what’s available, they will get a validation error message.

As powerful as the Edit Product page is, some quote lines can’t be separated into different orders. This can happen when you have a bundle on the quote. As you learn in the Configurable Bundles in Salesforce CPQ module, a bundle is just two or more related products that are sold as a set. So imagine you have a bundle for a laser printer, toner, and a paper tray. If the admin sets up the bundle so that the toner and paper tray are “component” or “accessory” options for the laser printer, they need to be in the same order. The Edit Products page will show the toner and paper tray with grayed-out checkboxes, indicating that it’s impossible to add them separately. Instead, you have to check the laser printer, which will auto-select the toner and paper tray.

Similarly, Percent of Total (PoT) quote lines can’t be separated from the quote lines that they’re related to. As a reminder, PoT quote lines are priced by adding together the value of other quote lines. If we think back to our pizza order, the PoT product would be the tip for the delivery driver. Add together the price for the pizza and breadsticks, take a percent of that, and you have the amount for the tip.

In this example, you can’t create separate orders for the pizza and the tip—they must be on the same order. That said, it’s possible to split the pizza and breadsticks into separate orders. If you do that, each order would have its own order product for the tip, and its price would be split proportionally.

One last thing to remember: the Edit Product page is only available for orders that are not activated. If you click Edit Order Products on an activated order, you get an error message. If your business processes allow for deactivating an order, you can use the Edit Order Products button again just as you would before activation.

Save the Date

In the first unit, we explain that orders are a commitment to a customer to provide goods and services at a certain time for an agreed upon price. Up to this point, we haven’t paid attention to the dates involved in order generation, but they are important, and a little nuanced.

There are four date fields to mind:

• Order Start Date
• Order End Date
• Start Date (on the order product)
• End Date (on the order product)

You can set the Order Start Date manually when using the Create Order button, just like you did when creating the first order in this unit. When you use the Ordered checkbox to generate an order, the Order Start Date is set automatically depending on the package level setting named Default Order Start Date.

Default Order Start Date value	Result
Quote Start Date	Copy date from quote’s Start Date field. If Start Date is blank, use today’s date.
Today	Use today’s date.
--None--	Use Order Management Plugin to determine the date.

The Start Date on the order product is set dynamically based on the Start Dates found on the originating quote and quote line. For example, imagine a quote starts January 1, and the quote line starts January 10. If Sales Ops chooses to manually set the Order Start Date later than the quote’s Start date, such as February 1, the order product Start Date will be set to February 10. The 10-day gap is preserved.

You can manually adjust an order product’s start date as long as the order isn’t activated. This gives Sales Ops a lot of flexibility when staggering provisioning for a single order. However, the order product Start Date must be on or after the Order Start Date. If you set the date too early, an error message appears when you try to save the record.

By using the Create Order and Edit Order Products buttons, you can quickly create custom, split orders while letting Salesforce CPQ manage the details. In the next unit, you learn how to set up CPQ to automatically split quotes into multiple orders based on almost any criteria.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Percent of Total Pricing
• Salesforce Help: Manage Dates for Your Orders and Order Products