What is wholesale?
Accounts are the doors you sell to. Wholesale orders are what they have committed to, from order through invoice to payment.
An account is one wholesale customer: a store, a chain, a distributor. A wholesale order is what they have committed to buy.
If What are suppliers and purchase orders? is the money going out, this is the money coming in from everybody who is not a retail customer. It lives under Wholesale orders in the sidebar.
Why does it need its own section?
Because a wholesale order behaves nothing like a Shopify order.
A Shopify order is paid, then shipped, then finished, usually within a week. A wholesale order is agreed in February for delivery in August, confirmed in April, shipped in two parts, and paid sixty days after that.
Fairgreen Golf Co. sells to forty pro shops. At any moment they need to know what is committed for next season, what has actually been confirmed, what has shipped, and who owes money.
Those are four different questions with four different answers about the same order, which is why it carries three separate statuses.
What are the three statuses?
They move on their own clocks, and that is the point.
- Order status: Draft, Submitted, Confirmed, or Cancelled.
- Fulfilment: Unfulfilled, Partly shipped, or Shipped.
- Payment: including Part paid and Paid.
Together they let the book say "confirmed, partly shipped, unpaid since May", which is a sentence a single status field cannot produce.
Fulfilment and payment stay locked until the order is Confirmed, with the reason shown next to the control. Nothing ships or invoices against an order that is not yet agreed.
What is a prebook?
An order placed ahead for a future season, as against an at once order to ship now.
That distinction is the spine of a wholesale season. Prebooks tell you what to make; at-once orders tell you what to hold. The ship window and cancel date on each order say when it can go and when the buyer can walk away.
The order book is sorted by ship window, nearest first, so what is about to ship is at the top.
What can you see about the money?
Each order carries an aging bucket: Not invoiced, No terms agreed, Current, 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60 days, 60 or more days, or Paid.
That is the collections list. It is the difference between knowing that somebody owes you and knowing who has owed you for two months. See How to find overdue invoices and quiet accounts.
What has to be switched on?
The Wholesale module, in How to switch parts of Tideswell on and off. With it off, every wholesale page is unreachable rather than merely hidden.
Viewing orders and accounts, and writing to each, are separate permissions.
Read this section in order
How to add an account and set payment terms first, because an account's payment terms are what produce an invoice due date. Then How to write and confirm a wholesale order and How to invoice a wholesale order and track payment are the order's life.
How to read your wholesale order book is the screen you will check most often.
How to find late orders and plan revisions
Filter the book to late orders, read the exception badges, and use the calendar to see what needs a decision this month.
How to add an account and set payment terms
Add a wholesale account with its buyer, rep and payment terms, which is what makes an invoice due date work.