Introduction

With Onport, you can set up automated back-ordering of your in-house inventory. What this means is that whenever there is an order for an item with negative inventory, Onport will automatically create a replenishment order for it. This article explains how this can be automated for an item, and how you can test it out yourself.

Automating back-ordering in Onport

To set up automated back-ordering, you will need to enable two settings in your Onport account:

1. Go to Setup > In-house Shipping and enable "Automatically back order items when out of stock":

2. Next, you will need to enable the SKU you want to make back-orderable. For this, go into Inventory and click on the name of the product. Under the Shipping tab > Automatically Backorder, you can select Backorder. If needed, you can select Vendor Default, if you want all SKUs of that vendor to be back-orderable:

Setting up a test sale

When setting up automated backorders, you may want to run a test sale yourself. To do this, find a SKU number of an item that you have set to backorder, and that has negative inventory. Then go ahead and create a test sale.

1. Go to Sales > New sale (top right corner). It will ask for a customer and channel, you can just pick them at random as they don’t matter at this point.
2. Paste the SKU number in the search bar and click finalize. It should then show that a fulfillment has been raised.

3. If you now go to Inventory > Replenishments, you should be able to see the order raised there, with a tag that it’s been automatically back-ordered.
4. If more of the items are ordered, the replenishment order automatically updates until the order has been finalized and closed.
5. From there it acts as a regular replenishment order (read here for more on how replenishment orders should be managed).
6. Once you have finalized a replenishment order, it closes down. If more of the items are ordered after the replenishment order has been closed, Onport will create a new replenishment order.