How to use "Stock Allocated" figure in EPOS?

[linnet27]

If I create a sales order in Actinic Business for 1 item that is out of stock and then Lookup that code in EPOS I see Stock Level=0 and Allocated=1

Before I can Complete that sales order (take payment/ship etc.) I need to create a purchase order for that item and get it into stock.

I go to "EPOS / Stock orders / Select stock replenishment" to create the PO but the item does not appear in that list.

If I Complete the order it now appears in the list. But I don't want to do that otherwise I'm going to have a big pile of orders on the printer that can't be shipped!

So I don't want to complete orders until I have the stock. We have 4,500+ products and even with just 100 orders containing out of stock items this immediately becomes unworkable.

Does anyone have any comments about this? Am I trying to do something unusual here!?

Many thanks.

[I-CC]

EPOS has a restock function/ability where you assign re-order levels based on reaching a certain level of remaining stock, i.e. today you have 4 of a certain item, and in EPOS you have it to re-order when stock is 3 or less. Tomorrow you take an order for that item which when you ship it then reduces stock to the threshold of 3 and when you run the re-stock in EPOS now, it will show an ordering being needed on that item for the stock (re-ordering) level you have set it.

If however, you only ever order stock in upon receipt of the order, where you always have zero stock and order from suppliers as the orders come in to you, then EPOS can not handle / gauge that, as it is a stock management solution, i.e. what do you stock and when to re-order that stock based on held stock levels and sales, not an automatic order from supplier upon your receipt of an item as EPOS does not know when an order received from a customer constitutes placing an order, if no stock is held and if no reorder level is assigned.

Guess solution in your case would be to write an app to search the EPOS db and output items which have zero stock held, but allocated orders, or where held stock (minus) allocated stock is a negative answer, and then you can manually create orders from that, but it would have to written for your specific needs to enable identification as easily and quickly as possible upon receipt of orders where you do not actually stock the item.