In the hire / rental industry, it's quite common for items to be issued to customers on a "sale or return" basis - such as cutting discs with a disc cutter or fuel with an excavator.

You want to send out a full tank of fuel with a piece of equipment, or you want to give the customer some cuttings discs, but you agree that they will only be charged for what they use, optionally returning a remaining quantity back into stock and not charging for that quantity.

This can also work well for collection charges, in that you want to put them on the quotation or order, but you don't want them to be picked up in the invoice run until you have confirmed the collection has taken place.

The default behaviour is, if you put a sales item on an order, as soon as it's been booked out it can show up on the next invoice during the invoice run or advance invoice. If any of the items are "booked in" then this results in an automatic credit for the unused items, if they have already been billed.

There's a setting for this, which can be enabled. The default behaviour is that this setting is turned off.

It can be enabled or disabled on the following areas. Setting this means any order that's created with this item on in future will have that flag set on the Order Item.

A product:

Setting this here is useful if the product is a "non-stock item" like fuel because you don't have a stock item for it so it would be set here in this instance.

A stock item:

On an accessory:

The reason for having the option on an accessory is because you may want to invoice for the item when booking in, only when the item is sold as an accessory, but then invoice straight away when the item is sold on its own.

On an Order Item:

Being able to change this setting on an Order Item allows you to turn it on or off on a per order basis to allow flexibility when dealing with customer requirements.

Then when you raise an invoice, if the setting is set to "Yes", nothing will be invoiced until you go ahead and book the quantity in:

In the following example, a quantity of 80 fuel were dispatched with the excavator, when we return the item and book in the accessory, if we put in 37 sold and 43 returned OK, the customer will then be invoiced for 37 once this has taken place.

In the following example, if we sent out 10 cutting discs with the "invoice at book in" flag set to Yes, we can book in 5 of ten, mark 2 as sold which leaves 3 still with the customer, this enables us to part return sales items and invoice for them if they are returned in stages. The likelihood is that most will all be consumed or return at the same time, but this allows for additional flexibility.