CubeCart Enhanced Admin Order Entry: Taking Orders Without the Guesswork

CubeCart’s back office can create an order, but the process was built for correcting an existing one rather than taking a new one from scratch. Anyone who has typed an order in while a customer waits on the phone knows the specific frustrations: finding the customer, working out the shipping price, and calculating the tax by hand.

Our Enhanced Admin Order Entry plugin addresses those. It requires no code edits to your store.

Finding the customer

Standard CubeCart customer search is narrow, which is a problem when someone rings up and you have their postcode but not the email address they registered with.

The Find Customers box sits above the address fields and fills the whole form from an existing account.
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This plugin broadens the search across every admin area where customers are searched, matching on partial values for first name, surname, email address, company name, postcode, address line 1, address line 2, town or city, and county or state, plus an exact match on customer ID.

In practice that means you can find someone from whatever they happen to tell you.

Shipping without guessing

Out of the box, adding shipping to a manual order means typing a number into a box. You are either looking it up somewhere else or estimating, and estimating is how margin disappears.

Once the customer’s details and the items are on the order, a refresh control next to the shipping field asks all of your enabled shipping modules what they would quote, and offers you the list to choose from. Free shipping is always offered as the first option regardless of what your modules return.

It is the same calculation your storefront would perform, so a phone order is priced consistently with a web order.

Tax calculated from the products

Adding tax manually normally means adding a separate tax line for each rate involved and working out the amounts yourself.

With this plugin you select a single tax type, and it evaluates every item on the order, applies the tax class set on each product, totals the result and puts the figure into the tax line ready to add. No multiple tax lines, no arithmetic. This applies to the Retail Pricing customer group.

Order weight

Existing orders show a total weight in the Shipping Information area of the Overview tab, in kilograms or pounds according to your store setting. It is calculated from the items on the order including any selected product options, which is what you want when you are deciding how to send something.

Four printed documents

Three of these are fully template driven and editable from within the plugin.

Order Summary prints the contents of the Overview tab, which is the internal copy you want when you are picking and packing.

Proforma Invoice and Packing List are both new documents, each driven by its own template that you edit in the plugin configuration. A base template is supplied for each, and you can use standard CubeCart Smarty code in them.

Print Invoice is the interesting one. In a standard store the printed invoice template lives in your admin skin files, which means a customised invoice is liable to be overwritten when you upgrade. This plugin moves the template into the plugin configuration instead, so it survives upgrades. If you already have a customised invoice, paste your existing template code into the Invoice Template tab and carry on.

That last point is worth dwelling on if you have ever lost a carefully built invoice layout to an upgrade.

Delivery agents

The plugin adds a delivery agents list where you define the carriers you use, with name, phone number, website and any notes you want to share with customers. Each order can then be linked to the agent shipping it.

Once linked, that information becomes available to your email templates through a $DELIVERY_AGENT Smarty object, exposing name, phone, url and notes.

That means a dispatch email can tell the customer who is delivering, with a link to track it, without you typing it each time.

Smaller things

Notes for an existing order appear on the Overview screen as well as the Notes tab, so you see them without hunting.

The order number is added to the page title on the Overview tab, which matters more than it sounds when you have several orders open in tabs.

New customers can be created as you take the order. Enter their details on a manual order and the customer record is created when the order is saved, rather than requiring you to set them up first.

Who it is for

If every order arrives through your website, you will not need it.

It earns its place if you take orders by telephone, in person, by email or on paper, if you issue proforma invoices, or if you have ever lost a customised invoice template to an upgrade. Trade suppliers and shops with a physical counter alongside the website tend to get the most out of it.

It also removes two specific sources of error that cost real money: shipping prices typed in from memory, and tax worked out by hand.

Getting it

The plugin is available from our CubeCart plugins range, or you can add Enhanced Admin Order Entry to your basket directly.

If you are unsure whether it fits how you work, or you want to check compatibility with your CubeCart version and skin before buying, open a ticket and ask us.