Converting Documents
Conversion is how one document becomes the next: quote to order, order to despatch, despatch to invoice. The engine copies the document forward according to a field map you define, and records where every line came from.
The field map
A conversion map says which slot on the source document populates which slot on the target. Most of it is obvious — customer, dates, currency, line item, quantity — but you decide, so a field that should not carry forward simply is not mapped. Internal notes on a quote need not appear on the customer's invoice.
Line-level provenance
This is the part that distinguishes a real document flow from copying records. The platform already links records to one another at row level, but fulfilment is rarely a whole-document affair. Order line 10 of 100 is despatched today, 40 next week, and the whole thing is invoiced across three invoices.
Conversion therefore records provenance per line: this invoice line came from that despatch line, which came from that order line, for this quantity. That is what makes the following answerable without a spreadsheet:
- How much of this order is still outstanding?
- Which invoices covered this despatch?
- Has this line been invoiced twice?
Partial conversion
Because provenance is per line and per quantity, converting part of a document is normal rather than a special case. Despatch what you have, and the order retains an outstanding balance that the next despatch draws down. The remaining quantity is derived from the links, not stored in a column that could drift.
Converting is not copying
The new document is a document in its own right, with its own lifecycle. Editing an order after despatch does not retrospectively change what was despatched — and it should not. If a customer queries a figure, the despatch note says what left the building on the day it left, regardless of what happened to the order afterwards.
Auditing
Turn auditing on for both header and line datastores. Between the audit trail and the provenance links you can reconstruct not only what a document says now, but what it said at every stage and what it was derived from.