Guide
Orders and jobs in a spreadsheet: what the system that replaces it looks like
Orders arrive by email, by phone and from the form on your website. Someone types them into a spreadsheet, someone else checks what needs doing, and the customer calls to ask what stage their order is at. This is what a system that sorts this out looks like.
Where the chaos in orders comes from
In a small company one person handles orders and a spreadsheet is enough. Problems start when there are dozens of orders a day, they arrive through several channels, and several people handle them.
Email, phone, the form on the website and a salesperson out on the road: each of these channels has its own inbox and its own notepad. An order from a phone call reaches the spreadsheet after lunch, so until then nobody knows it exists. A salesperson changes a price in their copy of the file and the warehouse does not see it. There is no single place that shows what has been received, what is in progress and what is waiting for confirmation. A customer calls about a delivery date, and whoever picks up searches the spreadsheet and promises to call back.
Every such question, and every check of which version is the true one, takes a few minutes. With dozens of orders a day that adds up to several hours of searching and calling back.
What an order management system looks like
A system I build around a company’s process is made of modules, meaning self-contained parts. For orders and jobs they are usually these:
Order intake
One form for every channel. The customer fills it in on the website or in the portal, a staff member fills it in from an email or a call. The form checks the fields as you go: missing address, wrong postcode, product unavailable. The order gets a number and its first status straight away.
Order list
The screen that replaces the main spreadsheet. Filters by status, customer, deadline, person responsible. Colour marking for anything late. The manager sees everything, a staff member sees what is assigned to them.
Order card
Everything about one order in one place: items, prices, address, documents, notes, change history and correspondence with the customer. Who changed what and when is recorded.
Statuses and notifications
The order moves through stages we define together: received, confirmed, in progress, shipped, closed. On each change the customer gets an email or a text. A staff member gets a reminder when something has been sitting too long.
Customer portal
The customer logs in and checks status, downloads the invoice, repeats a previous order. The “what stage is it at” calls disappear. What such a portal looks like in detail is in the guide on customer portals.
Documents and connections
Order confirmation, invoice, courier label and dispatch note are generated from the order data with one click. The tracking number comes back from the courier’s system to the order card. How such connections work is in the guide on connecting programs in a company.
How this differs from an off-the-shelf program
Ready-made order programs are fine if your process looks the way the vendor expected. If you have orders with unusual stages, individual quotes, installation at the customer’s site or make-to-order production, the ready-made program does part of the work and you do the rest in a spreadsheet next to it.
A system built around your process does exactly your process and nothing more. It does not have fifty features of which you use five. It has the stages you really have, with the names you use in the company.
An example from my work: the kayak rental system takes online bookings with payment, checks the availability of kayaks and vans, and staff see the list of trips for a given day. A ready-made booking program did not know the rule that the vans serve one direction at a time, so a start time booked on one route disappears from the others. The company would have kept running that in a spreadsheet anyway.
Where to start
Start with the one spreadsheet that hurts most. Often that is the order list. The first module usually replaces it after the first month, the team works on it, and their feedback shapes the next parts: the customer portal, documents, connections to accounting.
I move the data from the current spreadsheet into the system before launch. How to do that without a break in work is on the page about moving data out of spreadsheets. The bigger picture of when a spreadsheet stops being enough is on the main page of this guide.
Describe in the form below how you take orders today and what happens to them next. I will get back to you.
Questions and answers
Does the customer have to create an account to place an order?
No. An order can come from a form without logging in, and the customer creates an account only when they want to track status and see their history. For regular business customers an account makes sense from the start, because they see their prices and can repeat an order.
What about orders that still come by email and phone?
A staff member enters them into the system through the same form the customer uses. From then on they follow the same path as the rest. For emails with a repeatable structure, automatic reading of the content can be added so the system proposes a filled-in order.
Can the system connect to accounting and couriers?
Yes, that is usually part of the scope. The invoice is issued from the order data, the courier label is generated from the address, and the tracking number comes back to the order and to the customer.
Contact
Describe how you take orders today and I will tell you what a system could look like
You do not need a specification. Describe how the work looks today and what should change. We will write the scope together.