Usage

Setting up an account

Forklift → Companies → New company. Give it a name; the account code is generated from the name if you leave it blank, and it is what your warehouse will read on a pick note.

Then Buyers. Add people by email address — they need an account on your site already, because Forklift never creates users from a form. The first person added becomes the account's administrator whatever role you pick.

Role	Can
Administrator	Runs the account: adds and removes buyers, sets limits, approves anything, sees the statement.
Approver	Approves other people's orders. Does not administer the account.
Buyer	Places orders, up to their spend limit.
Viewer	Sees orders and quotes, can reorder into a basket, cannot place an order.

A spend limit is per order. Blank means no limit of their own; zero means they cannot place an order unassisted, which is what a new starter looks like.

Putting an account on hold

An account on hold cannot place new orders. Everything else — existing orders, quotes, invoices, the statement — is untouched, and taking it off hold is one click. Either from the company screen or:

php craft forklift/companies/hold ACME
php craft forklift/companies/release ACME

Contract pricing

The two-list pattern

The setup that covers most wholesale stores:

1. A trade list with Applies to every company on, priority 0, holding one entry: Everything, 15% off.
2. A customer list per negotiated account, priority 10, holding the handful of lines that customer argued over.

The customer list wins for the lines it mentions. Everything else falls through to the trade list. That is the whole rule.

Quantity breaks

Several entries on the same product with different From quantity values are a break table:

sku,price,minQty
FIX-M8-100,3.40,1
FIX-M8-100,3.05,50
FIX-M8-100,2.80,250

The resolver takes the highest rung at or below the quantity being bought, and tells your templates about the next rung up so a product page can print "50 more and they're £3.05 each".

Fixed against percentage

• Fixed is a negotiated number. It does not move when your list price does — which is what a contract means, and also what will quietly erode your margin if you forget it exists.
• Percentage off and amount off track the list price, so a price rise reaches trade customers automatically.

Importing

Control panel: Price lists → the list → Import. Command line, which is where a nightly ERP feed belongs:

php craft forklift/price-lists/import prices.csv --list=acme --dryRun
php craft forklift/price-lists/import prices.csv --list=acme

An import replaces the list. The spreadsheet is the contract, and a row you deleted from it should not survive in the store because nothing mentioned it.

A price ending in % is a percentage off list. Rows whose SKU does not exist in your store are imported and reported — they price nothing until the SKU appears, and the importer says how many did not match rather than letting a 40% miss rate look like a successful import.

Checking a price

Price lists → Price preview, or:

php craft forklift/price-lists/price FIX-M8-100 ACME 250

Both run the real resolver, so the number is a promise the checkout will keep. Both tell you which list won, which entry, which break, and — if a contract price was found and not used — why.

Approvals

Set an approval threshold on the company, a spend limit on a buyer, or tick every order needs approval on a buyer. When a basket trips one of those, the checkout button changes to Submit for approval.

Approvers get an email with a link that works without signing in, because the people who sign off spend very often have no login. They see the basket, approve or decline with a note, and the buyer is emailed the decision.

An approval records the amount it covered. If the basket grows afterwards it needs approving again; if it shrinks it does not.

Requests lapse after the configured number of days. A lapsed request is not an approval — the basket comes back to the buyer with the reason attached.

Net terms

1. Put the account on payment terms and tick trades on terms.
2. Give it a credit limit. Blank means no limit; zero means no orders on account.
3. At checkout the buyer sees a Purchase Order payment option, asking for their PO number.

The order completes with an authorised transaction, so it shows as unpaid — which is true, because nobody has paid. A charge goes on the ledger with a due date worked out from the terms. When the money arrives, capture the transaction in Commerce and record the payment:

php craft forklift/credit/payments remittances.csv   # accountCode,amount,reference,date

or from Credit → the company → Record a payment.

Payments are applied to charges oldest first. Nothing about the allocation is stored, so a backdated payment re-ages the account correctly.

The gateway withdraws itself when the account is over its limit — but the checkout does not stop. A customer over their limit holding out a credit card should be allowed to use it.

Quotes

1. The buyer asks. Your template posts to forklift/portal/request-quote and their basket is snapshotted, priced as they saw it.
2. Forklift → Quotes. Open it. Change quantities and prices, add lines, add delivery, add a whole-quote discount, set an expiry. Every line shows what that customer would otherwise pay, so you are discounting against something visible.
3. Save and send. Forklift builds a real Commerce basket carrying exactly those prices and emails the buyer a signed link.
4. The buyer clicks, their basket loads, and they check out normally — with any gateway you have, including paying on terms.

Re-price starts from what the customer would pay today, which is what you want on a quote that has been sitting for a fortnight.

Sending again discards the previous basket, so an older email cannot buy at an older price.

Quick order, CSV and reorder

The pad is at /forklift/quick-order, or build your own against craft.forklift and the forklift/quick-order/* actions.

Everything is checked before it is added, and nothing is silently dropped. A row that fails comes back with its line number, the text that was typed, and a sentence saying why. A CSV can have its columns either way round, may or may not have a header, and survives the byte-order mark Excel writes.

Reordering re-prices at today's rates and flags the lines that changed. A contract that has been renegotiated should not be quietly ignored.

Tax exemption certificates

Record the certificate against the company with its jurisdiction and expiry, attach the scan, and approve it. Only an approved, unexpired certificate that covers the delivery address removes tax.

A certificate with no country covers everywhere. A country with no state covers the country. A country and a state must match both — a Texas resale certificate does not exempt a delivery to Ohio, and letting it would be Forklift creating a tax liability on your behalf.

php craft forklift/maintenance/expiring-certificates 60

When something is not working

php craft forklift/maintenance/doctor

Every check in it is something that produces no error and no log line but quietly stops Forklift doing what you think it is doing.