The FF&E Worksheet screen with the optional Order Export plug-in is the same except for the addition of the Order... button (singular) on the Worksheet's "Commands" button set (see image). The latter is the key to converting your room FF&E to exported purchase order data.

All of the instructions below assume you are starting on the FF&E Worksheet screen of an opened project.

Checking Data

Before ordering items on the worksheet, we highly recommend that you use the Worksheet's Utilities> Setup Check command. This function creates a special query that searches for items that may have missing or unfinished information. For instance, if the quantity for a object component has not been entered, not only would that product be ordered with a quantity of zero, but its cost and price would not be in any reports you print. Since Setup Check uses the query mechanism, you can print reports from the query just like any other query, and modify the query if desired. Potential problems are always highlighted in red on the Worksheet screen, so it's easy to move through the resulting list to fix issues (or confirm that they are not a problem). As in other situations, you can double-click an object or spec in the FF&E Summary area to edit it directly.

Also note that the order creation process requires that a salesperson be selected on the Project List form for that project. If there is no "official" salesperson, you can create a dummy entry for a department or the whole company and use that instead.

Finally, if your specifications need to have alternate shipping destinations (such as fabric shipped to another vendor) or special shipping schedule instructions ("Deliver by" and a date), you will want to double-check these prior to the export process, since address information is normally exported also.

Separate orders are created for each combination of vendor (supplier) and shipping destination. If items are not set up with the correct shipping address, they will be lumped into a single order.

The shipping schedule entries are important if you are creating orders in phases for a large project, since the entries in a spec may refer to an earlier batch of orders.

Creating Orders

When you click on the Order... button, FF&EZ will display the "Order Conversion Setup" screen. This screen lets you select what will be ordered from the unordered FF&E in the project, using a combination of two basic scopes: an object scope and a location scope.

The object scope is either the currently highlighted object, the vendor of that object or all objects. The location scope is either the current room, the current area or the entire project. The combination of these two scopes will allow you to limit what is ordered to a number of useful subsets of your data.

In addition to the basic scopes, you can also set up a query (before you click Order...) to include any subset possible and then select the "All objects in the current query" scope. This scope is independent of the other options, but is disabled if no query is currently in effect.

For example, if you need to fast-track orders for a project area named "South Wing," but have not finished determining quantities for all items, you can set up a query for "Quantity (Worksheet) is greater than 0.0" and "Area ID is equal to 'south wing'." Since previously ordered items are automatically excluded, this will produce a set of all items in the area that have a non-zero quantity. Later, when the remaining item quantities have been determined, you can simply select the standard scope of "All objects" in "the current area" to produce the remaining unordered items for that area.

Once a scope is in effect, the Setup Screen will display two types of data: 1) the objects that have been selected, listed by location and 2) the specifications and total quantities needed to order for those objects' product components. You can switch between these displays with the buttons just above the display grid.

Note: FF&EZ creates as many orders to as many vendors as is needed to satisfy the ordering scope you select (including orders to accommodate alternate shipping addresses). This is then exported to a single file (or file set). If the software into which the orders will then be imported is restricted as to how many vendors or orders can be imported in one operation, you may have to use a more limited scope (you may also need a custom export process if the receiving system has severe limitations).

Proof Reports

At the bottom of the Order Conversion Setup window is a button that can be used to print the "Ordering Worksheet" report. This is the same report available from the main FF&E Worksheet reports list (under the Print command), except that it will automatically print only the items shown in your current ordering scope. This means that the report can serve two purposes:

1. It can be used to "test" the orders that will be created. The Ordering Worksheet is essentially a set of purchase orders without order numbers, and shows exactly what information will appear on the new orders when they are created. So, if you want to create a check set of ordering information to be sure you have everything complete, this is an excellent tool for that (of course, you can also edit the orders and their items after they are created, but this can help keep the original project spec descriptions more in synch with the orders they produced).
2. The report can be used as a compact backup record of the orders that were produced. As long as you print this report just prior to actually converting the FF&E to orders, it will match the descriptive text and quantities of the orders.

Once you are satisfied with what will be converted to orders, the next step is to perform the conversion and select the desired export format and structure (see next).