Stock is only removed from your database when a sale is posted to accounts, at which point the sale become locked. You may not wish to post to accounts, but you still want to reserve the stock so that it can't be bought by someone else.
Stock can be allocated to orders before it is actually updated. This will be subtracted from your stock in the stock table to give stock "on hand", which is effectively free stock ready to sell.
Allocating stock to a sales order
To allocate stock to an order, open the order and enter figures into the "allocate" column in the Products tab. Clicking the "allocate all" button will copy the order qty to the allocate qty. Click Save. Brightpearl will attempt to allocate as much stock to the order as it can, but if there are other orders with allocated stock, or there is insufficient stock on hand, then the quantity allocated may be less than the quantity on order.
You can only allocate stock that is "on the shelf". Stock is allocated from the warehouse that that particular sales order is set to. Stock allocation is not fully compatible with advanced order fulfilment, so if you have fulfilment switched on (there will be a "Fulfil" button at the top of the sales order edit screen), we recommend that you don't use allocation.
Allocation of website (ecommerce) sales
Orders placed on the website can be set to either allocate stock depending on whether it is available, or not to allocate stock at all. You can change this per payment method (so for credit card sales where you know payment has been taken, you can allocate stock, but for "on account" or cheque sales, you can choose not to allocate the stock. To amend the settings, use Setup - Options... - Payment from the main menu.
You can choose to prevent updates of orders (eg to change the order status) where stock is not fully allocated: Visit Setup - Defaults from the main menu and use the "Allow processing of unallocated orders" option in the Finance/Stock control tab. This will allow a user to edit the order, but not change or update the status until all the stock is allocated.
The orders list (Sales->Any status) shows the allocation status: a green tick is fully allocated, a red tick is not allocated, and a blue tick is partially allocated. The sales list also shows whether there are enough items on hand to ship the order, regardless of the allocation status; a green item is OK and a red item is not OK.
You may choose not to use stock allocation, it is optional.
Automatic stock allocation
Once you have just received stock from a Purchase Order, Brightpearl can run through all un-posted sales orders and attempt to automatically allocate the recently received stock. See the Sales - More - Allocatate Stock screen.
Viewing allocated stock
To view which orders a certain stock item allocated on, search for the item using the products quick search box then click on the number allocated.
