Merge Orders

[Bob Thompson]

Is it possible to merge two orders? We frequently run into situations where a customer or more than one customer within an organization place a couple of orders for the same event. Not identical items, but different products to meet their needs (i.e., award plaques & promotional items). Sometimes the orders are placed with different sales persons and they are unaware of the other orders placed for the gala or whatever.

At some point the question is asked "Can we just get one invoice for everything?" So, is there a way to merge multiple orders to accomplish that goal? We can merge customers -- why not orders?

[M. David Matney]

Merging of Customers is a way to correct errors made by your staff, whereby your staff creates two or more customers and later on they need to be merged. Orders are like receipts and cannot be merged because there are many aspects of an orders tracking and history that are important and merging an order would create inaccuracies in the tracking. For instance, when an order is place, by whom it was placed, which associate at your company took the order, when and which associate at your company changed aspects of the order, such as modifying line items, deleting line items, adding line items, modifying order header details, etc. etc.

Look at orders as a receipt. If you purchase something in a department store you get a receipt, and 3 days later someone else purchases the same thing, for the same event even, the department store will issue a new receipt. If both receipts were charged to a corporate account for that store, they will get two invoices. This is necessary for audit trail and accounting purposes.

Now with all that said, you can also take the line items from order B and add them to Order A and then after adding them, delete Order B. The big problem comes into play when you have Person A who ordered the items on order A and their contact name is listed on Order A. So you know who to call and/or e-mail with questions about that order if questions arise. If you add Order B's line items to Order A you may be adding someone else's line items and then if you have a question on those line items, you really don't know who (which of the 2 customers to call on the phone) if there is a question.