The sales process begins with the r

The sales process begins with the receipt of a customer order indicating the type and quantity of merchandise desired. At this point, the customer order is not in a standard format and may or may not be a physical document. Orders may arrive by mail, by telephone, or from a field representative who visited the customer. When the customer is also a business entity, the order is often a copy of the customer’s purchase order. A purchase order is an expenditure cycle document, which is discussed in Chapter 5.
Because the customer order is not in the standard format that the seller’s order processing system needs, the first task is to transcribe it into a formal sales order, an example of which is presented in Figure 4-2.