Do you collect orders for your Winter Collection in the Fall? Before you know it, winter is coming and you have several hundred Purchase Orders to create! Well, backordering could be the only thing you need this Christmas.
Backordering is an important tool for your business especially if you deal with pre-orders. Manually checking your sales orders and stock levels and then creating purchase orders is both time-consuming and frustrating. The backorder functionality acts as a connector by letting you convert sales orders to purchase orders and directly track the shipping status of those orders with minimal effort. Here’s how you can make the most out of backordering.
Before you start backordering there are two things you should set up on your Sales Orders to ensure that backordering in the future is a smooth process:
- Ensure all the Products that you will need to backorder have a supplier added in its product details.
- Ensure that each supplier has a default price list assigned.
Now that you have set those up, you can proceed to find out which products need backordering.
You can either create backorders individually or in bulk.
To create a backorder individually, go to the particular Sales Order. If the order requires a backorder, you will see a warning at the top of the sales order:
Click on Create Purchase Order and the following backorder form will pop-up on your screen.
You will then see all the products that need to be backordered.
You can also assign a tag to these backorders. This tag will be saved under both your Purchase Orders and your Sales Order so you can use it to filter through your orders later on.
Preview your Backorder:
You will be able to check the information on the Supplier and Shipping location. You can now save the order and email your supplier to notify them.
If you wish to create multiple backorders at the same time, select the Sales Orders you want to create Backorders for by checking the boxes. Then, click on Backorder.
All products that are in stock and do not need to be backordered, will be filtered away and the remainder will pop up in the backorder form.
Click on "Preview".
Here you can see the preview of all purchase orders that will be created when you click either “Save” or “Save and Email”.
Once again you can save the orders and directly email them to the relevant suppliers.
Alternatively, you can use a filter to bring up the Sales Orders that require backordering.
Click on the filter tab on at the top of your Sales Order.
Click on Backordering Status. You will be able to create filters for orders that have either already been backordered or partially backordered.
Once you have saved this filter, you can then create the backorders in bulk as we went through before.
Now that you have created your backorders you can track the shipping status of those orders.