> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.dmly.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Orders > How orders move product stock, and why the invoice — not the order — is what collects the money. An order records a sale — of products, services, plans, or one-off custom lines. It lives under **Finance → Orders**, and it is numbered separately from your invoices — `ORD-0001`, `ORD-0002`, and so on. Two things surprise people, so they come first: * **An order never collects money.** It has no pay link. To get paid, generate an invoice from the order and send that. See [Invoices](/finance/invoices). * **The Orders tab is not your online store.** If you sell on Shopify or WooCommerce, those orders sync separately and are a different thing entirely — see [Store orders](#store-orders) below. ## Orders and invoices are not the same job Confirming an order takes its products off your stock — the ones you track stock on. Cancelling puts them back. This is the only thing an order does that an invoice can't. Sending an invoice posts a debit to the client's statement, and can message it on WhatsApp. The pay link is minted separately, from **Payment link & QR**. Stock never enters into it. The invoice is the hub of Finance. Appointments, subscriptions and orders all *generate* invoices rather than being billed directly, and every payment — card, cash, bank transfer — lands in one ledger, usually linked to an invoice. So an order is best read as the stock half of a sale, with the invoice as the money half. An order with no stock-tracked product is perfectly legal — services, plans and custom lines are all first-class order items, and such an order still does everything else an order does. But if a sale involves no stock at all — a consultation, a deposit — an invoice on its own is usually enough. ## The lifecycle Use **Add item** to pick from your Products, Services and Plans, or choose **Custom item** for a one-off line. Prices come from your catalogue at the moment you build the order. See [Products](/offerings/products). The order is saved as **Draft**. Confirming is what commits the stock: for any product you track stock on, the quantity comes off your count. It happens exactly once — a double-click or a retry can't take the stock twice. The order status becomes **Confirmed**. The builder also has a **Confirm order immediately** switch, which confirms the order as you create it and skips the draft stop. Generate an invoice from the confirmed order. The invoice is linked back to the order, and from there you send it, share the pay link on WhatsApp, and record what comes in. Everything about getting paid happens on the invoice page, not here. Cancelling sets the status to **Cancelled** and restores the stock you committed. Cancelling is a one-way door. You cannot re-confirm a cancelled order — that guard exists so the same stock can't be deducted twice — so if the customer changes their mind back, build a new order. The confirmation reads `Cancel order ? This can't be undone.` ## Order statuses **Draft** → **Confirmed** → **Cancelled** are the three statuses your orders move between. Every order starts as Draft. Draft is worth knowing about, because two actions are limited to it: **Confirm order** and **Delete** appear only on a draft order. Once an order is confirmed, deleting is off the table — cancel it instead. **Fulfilled** and **Refunded** are unused status values on internal orders. Nothing in DMLY ever sets either one, so no order you create here can carry them. Track delivery and refunds on the invoice and its payments instead. ## Store orders Orders you create in **Finance → Orders** are internal: you build them, you confirm them, they move your stock. Orders that arrive from a connected e-commerce platform (Shopify, WooCommerce) are a separate record on a separate sync. They are what the `store.*` webhook topics — order created, order paid, checkout abandoned, inventory low — describe. Your Finance orders emit `order.*` topics instead. The two vocabularies look alike and mean different things, which matters mostly if you're wiring up automations or webhooks. The full topic list, including the `order.*` and `store.*` split. What connects to DMLY. ## Where to go next Send it, get paid, void it. The other half of every order. Connect a gateway so your invoices can carry a pay link. The catalogue an order draws from, and where stock tracking is set. How the six Finance tabs fit together.