Release the Order. The invoices follow.Shipments too, if anything ships.

Lead-to-Bill in Kugamon is the released Order doing the work: approval creates Assets, release creates Shipments for anything tangible and Invoices on the account's schedule, and each invoice goes out as a PDF or a live link with a checkout. Every one of those is a Salesforce record in your org, and un-releasing the Order reverses them until something ships or an invoice is posted.

What happens at each step

Order management: the record of the sale

The Order is where the deal becomes operational. It carries the buying, billing and shipping contacts, the bill-to and ship-to addresses, payment method, payment terms, credit status, billing method, invoice schedule and billing frequency, plus warehouse, carrier and delivery terms. Its lifecycle is Draft → Sent → Approved → Released, with Cancelled available at any point and Unrelease to step back. A Quote can generate one Order, or one Order per line group when a deal has to be fulfilled in parts. The Order configurator works exactly like the Quote configurator, minus optional lines, so a rep who can build a Quote can amend an Order.

Two rules protect the record. All Orders that are not Cancelled can be Released, and every release is reversible until a shipment has gone out or an invoice has been posted — after which the books, not the rep, own it.

Shipments and packing slips

Shipments are for tangible items and are created from the Order on release, never by hand from the Shipment object. By default every product creates one; the admin turns shipments off for the products that do not ship, rather than on for the ones that do. Order lines with the same available-to-promise date, shipping contact and warehouse are combined on a single Shipment, which defaults to Scheduled and shows the warehouse, carrier, tracking number and the per-line shipping contact the rep chose in the configurator. Statuses are Scheduled, Shipped, Delivered, On-Hold and Cancelled, updated from the record or in bulk from a list view. Packing slip PDFs are generated per shipment or in batches of up to ten.

This is the part of the workflow customers with physical products measure. Johnson & Johnson Health & Wellness reports a 93% decrease in shipping errors on Kugamon; Vita Group runs 7,200 orders a month through it with 250 active users. Both figures are theirs, not ours.

Invoice generation and schedules

Release creates the invoices. The schedule comes from the account's defaults and can be changed on the Order: One-Time produces a single invoice regardless of term, Yearly one per year, then Semi-Annual, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly and Daily — a 40-day term invoiced monthly produces two invoices, weekly five, daily forty. Service lines are split by unit of term so each invoice carries the right period.

Each invoice carries the products, services, additional charges and credits, discounts, tax and VAT/GST, Net Amount, Applied Payment Amount and Balance Due, with an Age field that fills once it is past due. It goes out as a PDF from a customizable template or as a live Online Invoice link, and the admin can add a checkout to either. Invoices support multi-currency, an approval workflow, a Restricted flag for internal review, partial cancellations through an additional credit, bulk PDF creation, and bulk status updates from a list view. Posting an invoice records it as booked and locks the Order behind it.

Tax

US sales tax runs on Tax Locations set up once in Kugamon Settings — state, county, city or zip, each with effective-dated rates so a rate change takes effect on the right day. International VAT/GST is supported per country and rate. The tax location is assigned on the account, the taxable flags on the product, and both must be marked taxable for tax to calculate; exemptions are flagged at the account level. Tax appears on the Quote, the Order and the Invoice from the same setup.

When Kugamon is not the right choice

Kugamon bills what is on the Order, on a schedule. If your revenue is metered consumption at high volume that must be rated before it can be invoiced, Zuora has a mediation and rating engine and Kugamon does not; the Zuora comparison is candid about it. If you run a warehouse operation that needs pick paths, bin locations and carrier rate shopping, that is a WMS or ERP job — Kugamon's Inventory add-on tracks quantities by warehouse against Orders and Shipments, and stops there. And Kugamon is not a general ledger; it produces the invoice and your accounting system books it.

For a company selling one-time products and services on Salesforce, this workflow is the Quote to Cash edition at $95 per user per month. When the invoice is out, Lead-to-Cash is how the money comes back.