Committed

If you've never come across this terminology before, "stock committment" just means reserving the stock for a customer that has ordered it. If we didn't commit stock that was ordered then that same stock might be ordered by a different customer and you might be left in a situation where you didn't have enough stock to fulfil both orders.

It's best practice to commit all stock on an order pretty much immediately after it has been placed. Of course, there are many situations where this won't apply: for example, if a customer is placing an order to be fulfilled in two months time and you don't even have the stock yet. But generally, especially for retail orders coming from your webstore, you'll want to commit stock straight away. Pakk stores are set up to autocommit stock as soon as the order is placed, so no manual intervention is needed for incoming web orders.

Batch Selection = Stock Committment

Refresher Inventory tracking in Pakk always works through the batch mechanism. If you don't need/want to track batches for a particular product, that's fine - you just set up an ALL batch and use that. This system means that you can move fluidly between batch and non-batch tracking (or employ both at once for the same product) with zero friction, when and if you need to.

• To commit a line on an order, you just choose a batch.

  • Lines without a batch specified are not committed.

  • Lines without a batch specified are therefore back ordered.

  • Lines with a batch specified are completely committed (i.e., all that line's quantity is committed).

• A line is either committed or not commited - you cannot partly commit a line.

• If you need to partly commit a line, then you just split the line out into two lines and commit one corresponding to the quantity you want to commit and leave the other uncommitted.

• Line splitting is one of those annoying times when a rounding error can be introduced if the way the line split falls causes the total of the two lines to be different from the total of the original single line. In this case, use the adjustment fields in the total box to compensate.

Non Stockable Products

Non stockable products are not inventory tracked, therefore it makes no sense to talk about committing them. An order line for a non stockable product will not give you the option to select a batch.

Automatic / Intelligent Commitment

As mentioned above, orders flowing from your websites are committed automatically. To go into a bit more detail: when the order is placed, Pakk automatically runs its 'intelligent' batch picker over the order - attempting to choose and allocate batches according to some simple criteria:

• Don't pick batches that have an expiry date and are expired!

• Choose batches with the earliest expiry first

• For batches without expiry, choose the oldest batch (FIFO)

The autocommitter will also intelligently split lines in the case that a line can only be partially committed.

Of course, for orders that are placed manually, you have access to the autocommiter both from the order drilldown page or in bulk from the 'Pending Committment' order list view. If you run the autocommitter on an order that already has committments, those will not be touched, only the uncommitted stock will be processed, so don't be scared to use the autocommitter on partially committed orders - you won't mess anything up! If you do happen to want to remove existing committment and have the autocommitter run from a fresh state, you can either remove specific committments by hand or remove all committments on an order by choosing the action 'Uncommit', either from the drilldown or list view.

Order Committment Status

The overall committment status on an order is derived from the status of the lines, taking into account non stockable products. If all lines (excluding non stockables) are committed, then the order is fully committed. If some, but not all, lines are committed, then the order is partially committed. If no lines are commited then the order is not committed.