Sage allows you to back date an invoice before the despatch date. We have had timing issues between sales and cost of sales because an order has been despatched on the first day of the month but mistakenly invoiced on the last day of the previous financial month. As we were still closing the previous month, the accounting period was still open. There should be an error message which highlights to you that you have selected an invoice date which is before the despatch date. I thought to get around this issue, you can include the despatch date in the sales order listing. But alas, you cannot include the Despatch Date as a column. Please can I request that Despatch Date is added as a column within the Sales Order Listing. For now, we are going to run the Sales Orders Despatches report to check the despatch dates on orders not yet invoiced.