Documents and how they connect

How to find a document quickly

If you know its number, or even part of a customer’s name, do not go hunting through menus:

1. Press Ctrl + K — ⌘ K on a Mac — from anywhere in the app. You can also click the search button in the top bar.
2. Start typing the document number, customer or supplier.
3. Click the result to open it.

How to see what a document turned into

A document is usually one link in a chain — a quotation became a sale, which became a delivery.

1. Go to Sales or Purchase Orders.
2. Open the row menu on the document, or open its detail panel.
3. Click Document flow.

You get a picture of the related documents around it, and you can click any of them to jump there.

Only sales and purchase orders have this

Document flow is wired on exactly two screens. Every other document type keeps its links internally, but has no button to show you the picture — you have to follow the references by hand.

Why every screen looks the same

Quotations, purchase orders, stock transfers, invoices, work orders — SaleSprint has just over a hundred document types, and they are all built on the same handful of ideas. Learn them once and every transactional screen in the product becomes readable.

Posting is the moment that matters

A document spends its early life as a draft: editable, reversible, and with no effect on anything outside itself. Nothing you do to a draft touches your stock or your books.

Posting is what makes it real. Depending on the document, posting will:

• move stock,
• write a balanced journal entry to the general ledger,
• route the document for approval if a rule applies,
• and send notifications once the whole thing has committed.

The ledger entry is the strict part. Every posting goes through one checkpoint that refuses to write unless the debits equal the credits and the accounting period is still open. A document cannot post into a closed period by any route.

Statuses

Most documents move through some sequence of draft → pending approval → posted → cancelled, with reversals where money is involved.

The words vary by area

The vocabulary is not perfectly uniform across the product. Sales documents finish as completed rather than posted; invoices use paid, partially paid and overdue; backorders have pending cancellation; production plans use in progress and on hold.

Read the status list on the screen you are on rather than assuming it matches the one next door.

Document numbers

Numbers are generated for you, in the shape:

SAL-20260921-143052-004871

— a prefix, then the date the document was numbered, the time to the second, and six final digits that keep two documents numbered in the same second apart.

The prefix is yours to set, per document type, in settings. The rest is fixed, and it is fixed for a reason: every part of the number comes from the moment of creation, so nothing has to ask a central counter “which number is next?”. That is what lets a till on a flaky connection — or no connection — number a document on the spot and still be certain it will not clash with one a colleague created at another branch. A number that counted 1, 2, 3 could not promise that: two offline tills would both reach for the same next number.

So a number tells you when, not how many. SAL-20260921-143052-004871 is the sale numbered at 14:30:52 on 21 September 2026; it does not mean it was the 4,871st. To count documents, use the totals on the list screens and reports rather than reading the number.

Following the trail

Business documents are chains. A quotation becomes a sale, the sale is delivered, the delivery is invoiced, the invoice is paid. The same is true on the buying side, from requisition through request-for-quote, purchase order, goods receipt and supplier invoice to payment.

Every document can show you that whole chain. The document flow view lays the related records out in process order — quote, order, fulfilment, returns, financial, treasury, ledger — as swimlanes on a wide screen and a vertical stepper on a phone. Tapping any card jumps to that record or re-centres the view on it.

The chain is worked out live from the records themselves, so it is never stale and there is nothing to rebuild.

Two smaller tools are built on the same foundation:

• Peek — tapping a document number anywhere opens a side panel with the header, who it is with, its first few lines, and one hop of related documents, without leaving the page you are on.
• Jump — Ctrl+K (⌘+K on a Mac) opens a search across every document type, plus contacts, products and employees. It matches document numbers first, and only ever shows you records you have permission to see.

A contact’s record carries the same idea: their transactions list lets you peek at any document without navigating away.

Undoing a posted document

A draft is deleted. A posted document is cancelled, which is a different operation and leaves a different trail.

Cancelling keeps the original row — it stays visible and stays in your reports, marked cancelled — and then reverses its effects: stock movements are put back and the ledger entries are reversed.

A reversal is a new, compensating entry with the debits and credits swapped, linked back to the entry it reverses. The original is never edited or removed. Your books therefore show both the mistake and its correction, which is what an auditor expects to see.

Ledger entries the system generated cannot be deleted at all — only reversed. Manual journal entries someone typed by hand are the one exception.

Trying to cancel a draft is refused, with a message telling you to delete it instead.

Related

• Approvals — what happens when posting needs a sign-off
• Settings and how they resolve — where number prefixes live