My company (in Japan) imports furniture and finishings for hotels. 

This is what usually happens: One of our clients (an architect) will specify our chairs and sofas for a new hotel project. We immediately mark this as a potential, and send the client catalogus, samples, price lists etc as needed. Sometimes, the job will disappear (not enough budget, change of design etc) and we mark the potential as "closed lost".

But sometimes, the project will continue, and we get an order.

So, at this point, we place the order with the Spanish sofa manufacturer (for example) and arrange for the sofas to be delivered. Along the way, we need to track whether the sofas were ordered, the estimated date they will be ready for delivery, when my shipping company can collect the order and import to Japan, the tracking details, and then the final delivery details to the client's hotel.

Originally, I thought it might be a good idea to track everything in the "Potential" module- and to customise the fields (for example, add the potential status "product ordered", "product shipped", "product held in customs", "product released" etc. We could also add fields for the tracking number, delivery addresses and so on. 

But then I thought that the "Sales Order" module handles a lot of this- and maybe it would be better to customise the "Sales Order" module instead, and have a definite switchover from a "potential" to a "sales order" when the order is placed (this is obviously more logical). 

So my questions are:

1. What is the normal/recommended way of doing this?

2. How easy is it to "trigger" a sales order when a potenital's order is changed to "closed won"?

3. Is what I want to do a pipe-dream or is it within the scope of Zoho? It seems like a fairly natural thing to do.

It is very stupid to have to manually type a new sales order (i.e. copy and paste from the potenital) which is the current method. (to be honest it's completely pointless, and I can't understand why you would do this- there are many errors, and it takes much time).

Finally, I should add, we want to be able to view our current jobs/projects and be able to see where they are and at what stage they are. For example, if we need to call the courier to collect the sofas, or if we need to call customs to provide tax info, or if we have to call the client to let them know the order has arrived etc. We want to simplify (and automate) as much of this as possible.

I await your reposnse(s)!