We often work with reservations and pre-orders which means we have multiple draft/completed orders open from the same customer. This works, but it sometimes is a bit messy:
Because the PO is not a field in the sales dashboard they have to be separated out by date which is unclear at times. (I requested that elsewhere).
The open order will move down the cue of orders often to the next page so you kind of lose them (you can of course filter them out - but still)
as the order numbers are the same as the invoice numbers you sometimes send an invoice with a number lower than the one you sent before (this is very minor and a bit my OSD )
as the delivery dates can be uncertain you sometimes kick them around as you can’t delete a set deliviery date (also requested elsewhere)
I feel it would be a benefit to have an option to label an order as reserved before it becomes an actual order or maybe even create a whole seperate section, where you can easily lock stock connected to a customer which you then can push through as an order when the beer is ready and the delivery is pending
Thanks, Gijs. You’re right this could certainly be handled better.
I think your final point hits the nail on the head. I think the best solution here would be able to allocate/reserve stock for a specific customer without having to add it to an order. Ideally, this could also reserve stock not yet produced, so you could plan to package 100 cans of a brand new beer, having pre-agreed who will be the lucky first customer(s) (possibly your own taproom for new releases).
When a customer next had an order created for an item that was reserved for them, it would use up their reserved stock first.
I used another system before that you could just partially invoice a sales order.
So you could invoice the stock you are delivering now and the invoice would only include the that, taking them out of your inventory. The sales order would stay open util all the items were invoiced and dispatched. The result would one sales order linked with multiple invoices.
I was also able to add items out of stock to orders but these would be cleared flagged and those would not be invoiced until they are back in stock.
We recently open pre sales for a special label and its becoming a problem if the order includes other labels.
Related to this it would be useful to lock products (excuses me if I miss if this is already possible) - we have updated products in stock that only should be ordered after the old ones are depleted
A couple of features mentioned have improved, But how is the ringfencing moving along - decent amount of votes
Basically every month after our newsletter we have a jumble of orders and multiple dated pre orders over the month, creating chaos on our sales dashboard. Ringfencing stock for future orders would be extremely welcome…
)