Back to Back Order & Sales

What is a back to back order?

As global supply chains increase in intelligence, the need to keep everything you sell in stock has reduced. In fact, more and more businesses will look to hold stock of their fast selling lines and certain items with long lead times but have a range of products they will only purchase on the back of sales order demand.

Operating in this way allows businesses to offer a wider and more comprehensive range of products to their customers, creating far more sales opportunities than selling only items they hold in stock. It also reduces the amount of capital that needs to be tied up in stock, especially when high value products or items with multiple variations are involved.

Extensive purchase order management

In the majority of cases businesses would handle the purchasing of these items by simply running the ‘To Purchase’ report within OrderWise to identify the quantities required and when to meet the demand and raise a purchase order to the supplier as needed. However in certain circumstances it becomes more beneficial to use ‘back to back’ ordering as a way of managing the purchasing of non stock items.

Automatic purchase order creation

Back to back ordering is the process of raising a purchase order for goods to a supplier on the back of sales order demand with any purchase orders raised and stock ordered as a result being allocated to the sales order. Unlike Direct Ordering where the supplier would send the goods directly to the customer on your behalf, back to back is used primarily to manage goods that you do not want keep in stock but want to bring in and then send to customers as required.

Existing back to back functionality within OrderWise enables users to flag lines within a sales order as back to back so that when the sales order is saved a purchase order’s will be automatically created for the flagged sales order lines. Users can also flag customers as back to back meaning that each sales order created for the customer will have unique purchase orders raised for the items in the order.

The back to back functionality in OrderWise allows any variant to be set as back to back. Any sales order created containing back to back variants will then automatically have a purchase order raised for the back to back variants. This functionality is particularly useful for managing items that will be specific to a customer’s requirements i.e bespoke size, configuration, colour etc and to ensure that the stock is allocated to the sales order so it cannot be used for any other orders.

This feature to extend the way back to back ordering can be managed provides outstanding flexibility and control of order processing and ensures an efficient and accurate process can be achieved.

For more information on OrderWise download our ERP brochure.