Invoicing items on backorder

Keeping track of your stock items is a task that the CRM allows you to run nicely with a range of features that allow you to keep every part of the process under control. But what if you want to have some wiggle room by being less strict in terms of reporting what you deliver to your customers?

If you still want to bill your customers for items that you do not have in stock quite yet, the CRM allows you to do so by enabling the following flag system-wide from Admin > General > Invoice Settings.

By default, if you do not have enough items to fulfill a Sales Order, CRM will only allow you to generate an Invoice for the items you do have in stock and are allocated to the Sales Order in question. The flag mentioned above allows you to actually generate Invoices for those items on backorder.

Let us take a look at the example below. For this customer we have an Invoice for 2 items of the same product:

This was generated from Sales Order S-95, which keeps the same items in backorder:

When you go to the respective product and check the Prior Items Sold tab you will find that even though the item was invoiced, the backorder still remains, so in order to have your items physically shipped to your customer you still need to have them into stock before proceeding.

With this feature you need to be aware of the amount of items that go into backorder and you still need to fulfill, given that invoicing gets easier, it is also easier to forget the Sales Orders that need to be addressed.

You can always check them under Menu > Inventory > Backorders.

You can also perform a search on the Status column in Sales Orders, as demonstrated in the following screenshot, where “back” has been entered into the search box to generate a list of all orders that have items on backorder.

Once thing you must consider before using this feature is making sure that your accounting system (if your the CRM is linked to it) allows stock items going into negative stock, if it does not then it might be best to use other alternatives, like using Deposit Invoices for instance.