The Pain of Backorders

Having a system in place to connect customer backorders with vendor purchase orders is critical.
Backorder

Problems that we are the solutions

Customer back orders disconnected from vendor purchase orders

No visibility of customer order status

Tedious product data entry

Different pieces of related information found in different places

Entering information on vendor Purchase Orders and customer Back Orders separately

No visibility of in-stock inventory to fulfill an order

Accounting unable to handle long-term sales agreements

Excessive Purchase Orders to the same vendor

No high quality images of exactly what customer wants/Dissatisfied customers when they receive a product different than what they ordered

People like you do it this way

As time has progressed, the industry has learned that it’s impossible to keep stock on all the possible inventory your customers might be looking for. Your store might be able to fit a few thousand products, but with all the vendors you do business with, there could be nearly half a million products that could possibly be ordered. So instead of keeping these items in your store, you offer a catalogue for your customers to browse. Moreover, you find what they need – or you might even find what they’re looking for as well. In any case, you will need to order those items from your vendor for your customer.


Having a system in place to connect customer backorders with vendor purchase orders is critical. Let’s say you’re receiving a shipment of 30 products from your vendor.

You’ve placed a Purchase Order with your vendor to fulfill a customer’s Back Order. A week later, this customer calls to check on the status, and their salesperson is unavailable. Somebody else needs to figure out how to answer the customer’s question.

When you have a customer in front of you waiting for you to ring up their order, you need things to go quickly. While you’re trying to pull together product details manually to invoice the customer, they may get impatient and change their mind, walking out before you can finish entering their order.

Part of any backorder is actually finding the product your customer wants. If you do business with 10 different vendors, you may have 10 different catalogs, each presented in their own way, sorted in no helpful order, and no ability to search.

Even if you have a system in place to track your back orders, you need to get your product information from somewhere. If you rely on the paper catalogues and price sheets, it means entering product information into your system manually.

Your customers want to be absolutely sure they’re going to receive what they are ordering. It’s not always easy to show them, though, since vendors don’t typically provide a complete set of full-quality product images.

As much as you dislike it, everybody inevitably has their own way of doing things. One person may enter product information one way, while another person enters it totally differently.

So your customer has placed a backorder with you, and you go and order that item from your vendor, only to find out later that you already had that exact item in your inventory.

Every business handles its accounting department differently. When it comes to backorders, some companies consider it a sale when the order is first placed, while others consider it a sale only once their customer has received the item.

Some companies rarely ever do back orders, while others do them primarily. Depending on which business model you follow, you need to stay efficient with handling business with your vendors.

Customer Backorders in RMPro are connected in many different ways with their corresponding Purchase Orders with your vendors. When you create a Back Order in RMPro, you can automatically produce a new Purchase Order that becomes linked together and reserved for that customer.


In RMPro, a Backorder Invoice is a specific type of customer invoice which contains an order of virtual inventory rather than physical inventory. This means they are buying something you don’t currently have in stock, and thus you need to order it from your vendor, which provides those items.

One of the most significant advantages of RMPro is how it has links between customer Backorders and vendor Purchase Orders. These explicitly connect a requested piece of inventory with an actual stock item – even if you haven’t ordered and received that item from your vendor yet.

There’s no reason why you should have to do double-entry. Once you’ve created a Back Order, the product information can be automatically copied over to the Purchase Order for your vendor.

Not only does RMPro support preloading vendor product information, but you can also have it connected with our DataLink solution, with access to hundreds of thousands of products.

When following up with Back Orders and making sure they get fulfilled, RMPro’s Backorder Link screen allows you to link a Back Order item with an existing in-stock item instead of placing a new Purchase Order to your vendor.

Regardless of how your company does business, RMPro gives you the flexibility to ensure your accounting department gets accurate reports based on your practices.

A Back Order which needs to be fulfilled by the vendor takes a bit of time. Some vendors can ship and deliver the item in a few days, while others might still need to manufacture an item and take a few weeks.

When you’re receiving a shipment from your vendor, RMPro gives you a clear indication that an item is linked to a Backorder so that you can set it aside for your customer.

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