Recurring orders, without retyping every time

There is a category of customer worth more than the others: the ones who come back. The bar that orders the same six cases every Monday, the shop that redoes the same assortment at the start of the month, the family that takes the same shopping every Friday.

And there is a quiet way of wasting them: redoing by hand, every time, a document identical to last month's.

The real cost is not the time

Retyping eight lines costs two minutes. The problem is something else: every retype is a chance to get it wrong — a quantity copied badly, a price left at the old one, a line skipped because the phone rang halfway through.

The mistake does not show up straight away, either. It shows up when the customer compares this month's receipt with last month's and finds two different figures for exactly the same goods. At that point the argument is no longer about price: it is about the fact that one of the two totals is wrong, and neither of you knows which.

What a duplicate should copy, and what it should not

A duplicate done well copies the things that repeat and leaves behind the things that do not:

• copies: customer, items, quantities, prices;
• does not copy: date, document number, payment status.

The third point matters most. A new document born already marked «paid» because the original was is the fastest way to lose track of the money: something shows as collected that has not arrived yet.

A duplicate is a new document that resembles an old one, not a copy of the old one.

Between different customers, too

The less obvious case is just as useful: the same assortment sold to two different customers. The price list is the same, the quantities too — only the name changes. Starting from a document you have already made and changing just the recipient is faster and safer than composing from scratch an order you have already composed once.

How Yataio does it

Open the document you want to redo, and at the bottom of the record — next to Copy text and Share — there is the icon with two overlapping sheets. You tap it, the app asks who it is for, and the document opens already filled in with the same items, the same quantities and the same prices. You pick the same customer or another one, change what you need, save.

The duplicate has a new date, a new number and an initial status. It does not carry over the private notes: a reminder written for a sale three months ago is almost never right for today's.

The whole step is explained in the guide. If the recurring order needs confirming first and collecting later, the path is the one described in how it works.