We need both Sales Orders and Estimates for specific reasons and I agree QBO made a very poor decision not to include Sales Orders (and a dozen other crucial features that are available on Desktop but not Online). The inventory problem has already been addressed, so I won't add to that.

However, we need to use Estimates to see what WE estimated would be our cost to complete a specific job or fulfill an order. That is an internal estimate that we generate to see if we even want to accept the job, and also to track purchases against so we can also create Estimate vs Actual job costing (which of course is another critical report not available Online!). We use Sales Order to invoice the customer.. that's the "estimate" the Customer sees. They are two separate things for a reason. Estimates and Sales Orders will have different information in them, because obviously we don't give the customer our internal estimated cost to fulfill their order. I understand some businesses can simply add a line for "Overhead" and forward the whole estimate to the customer, but that is not the norm. Generally customers don't need to see how much we'll be spending for every widget necessary to complete their project. The only thing the customer needs to see is how much the job/order will cost them.

In desperation I tried creating two Estimates so that one could act as a Sales Order but that only created other problems. I've tried suggestions on using Budgets for internal estimating, but apparently the ones suggesting Budgets have never actually had to do real project costing (say, as a builder constructing a house). This thread is almost a year old, with no practical fixes available.