Within Xebra, a job is a record that does many things. You create a job to do most tasks and a job is also used to tie together related tasks. For example, suppose that one of your customers contacts you and asks you for a price for some things because they are thinking about ordering them.
In Xebra, you create a job record that links to the customer who made the request and you add the items to the job that the customer requested.
If you don't already have prices for the items stored in Xebra, you could use the job that you entered to generate a quote request to send to the supplier(s) of the items.
When the supplier(s) respond to your quote request, you would update the job record with the prices that they give you.
Once you have the supplier's prices, you can use the job to generate a quote to the customer with your marked-up prices.
The customer orders based on the quote you sent and you record the order on the same job. At this point, the job switches from being a quote to being an order.
Once the job is an order, you can use the job to send an acknowledgement to your customer
You then use the information on the job to send a purchase order (or multiple purchase orders if the items come from more than one supplier).
If the supplier sends a purchase order acknowledgement or order status, you can record that information within the job.
When the supplier(s) send you their invoice(s), you receive them through the job and this way generate accounts payable entries.
Once you are ready, you use the job to send an invoice to your customer. At this point, the job switches from being an order to being an invoice and therefore an accounts receivable entry.
When the customer pays, you apply the payment to the job.
Once the job is paid in full, the job switches from Invoiced status to Paid In Full status.
The above example demonstrates many of the functions that you can carry out using a single job without duplicate data entry. You aren't forced to go through all of these steps on each job. Its pretty common for a job to start out as an order if you don't need to do any quoting. It's also possible to create a job for quoting and never go through with an order. If a customer rejects a quote, you would set the job status to Rejected to remove it from the list of unfinished jobs. Jobs can also handle other special tasks that we will cover later.
In summary, a Xebra job is often the center of activity. It links to a single customer, one or more line items, and one or more suppliers and allows you to do many things without repeat data entry.
