What is an order form?

What a good order form captures

Five groups of information carry almost every order. Who is buying, including the account or customer number the seller already uses. What they want, as lines of product code, description, variant and quantity rather than a paragraph. Where and when it goes, with the delivery address, access notes and any date it must arrive by. How it will be billed, including a purchase order number if the buyer's accounts team needs one to pay. And an acknowledgement of the terms in force, such as the current price list and payment terms. An order form missing any one of these generates a phone call, and every phone call is a chance for the order to be copied down wrongly.

Order form, purchase order and invoice

Three documents often get blurred. An order form belongs to the seller: it is the seller's structure for receiving a request. A purchase order belongs to the buyer: it is the buyer's internal authority to spend, with its own number, and it may be sent instead of an order form or quoted on one. An invoice belongs to the seller again and comes last, asking for money. In a small business these can collapse into one email, but as soon as an accounts team is involved on either side, the purchase order number becomes the thread that ties the order, the delivery and the invoice together, which is why a field for it saves a great deal of chasing later. A quote sits earlier still, from the seller, and when an order form refers to a quote number the seller can check the prices against what was offered.

Australian invoices that follow an order

The order form has no required format, but the invoice that follows it does, and the order is the easiest place to collect what the invoice will need. The Australian Taxation Office says a seller must provide a tax invoice within 28 days when a customer asks, unless the sale is $82.50 including GST or less. A tax invoice for a sale under $1,000 must show seven details, including that it is a tax invoice, the seller's identity and ABN, the date, a description with quantity and price, the GST payable and the extent each sale is taxable. For sales of $1,000 or more it must also show the buyer's identity or ABN, so a trade order form should ask for the buyer's ABN up front.

Mistakes that create phone calls

Free text boxes for products, which turn every order into an interpretation exercise. Quantities with no unit, so twelve might mean bottles or cases. No field for delivery constraints such as loading dock hours or a site contact. Prices typed onto the form that went out of date two price lists ago. No confirmation step before the order is sent, even though accessibility guidance for financial commitments expects submissions to be reversible, checked for errors or confirmed. And no reference returned to the buyer, so their follow up email has nothing to quote. Each of these is cheap to fix on the form and expensive to fix on the phone.

Building one in this form builder

The product order example is a classic form for trade accounts: business name and account number, who is ordering, a purchase order number, an order table, delivery address and method, billing details and two required confirmations. A table field has named columns with minimum and maximum rows, and in the CSV export it becomes one column holding a JSON array of the filled rows, so plan to split it in the spreadsheet or pass it to an ordering system. The webhook add-on posts each submission once as JSON with a 10 second timeout and no retry, and email alerts send the values to one address. There is no payment field among the 41 component types, so payment follows on the invoice.

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