Given the wide variety of businesses, this means that the orders can be fulfilled in several ways.
Broadly, the fulfillment modes, based on the relationship between the order receipt and production, are as follows: A sales order is an internal document of the company, meaning it is generated by the company itself.
The customer's PO is the originating document which triggers the creation of the sales order.
In a manufacturing environment, a sales order can be converted into a work order to show that work is about to begin to manufacture, build or engineer the products the customer wants.
Many sales orders are no longer paper-based, but rather transmitted electronically over a corporate Intranet.