Reservations and availability

Three numbers that are easy to confuse:

• stock — how many units physically lie there,
• reservation — how many of them are already promised to somebody,
• availability — how many are left to sell.

The shop displays the third figure to customers, and the warehouse works with the first. The reservation links the two.

How a reservation is created

An order declares demand, and the module looks for cover: it picks a building and, within it, specific goods. From that moment those units are promised: they still lie on the shelf, but nobody else will buy them.

A reservation is released when the order is picked, cancelled or returned. Each of those shows in movement history as Reserve and Release.

When there is nothing to cover it with

An order with no cover becomes a backorder: it waits for goods instead of taking units reserved for another order.

Tied to a location

A reservation is not limited to building level; it can name a specific bin location. Picking then knows which location to go to, and two waves do not send two operators for the same unit.

This is also the point at which a reservation is most often misread.

Caution

Moving goods between warehouses does not move the reservation’s attribution. After a transfer or an opening count an order may briefly point at a building the goods have left, until the reconcile re-assigns the cover. The physical location takes precedence over the record, and the record is corrected afterwards.

The shelf floor

A warehouse can protect part of its stock from the network: transfers and fulfilment from other buildings never draw below the floor. The Shelf floor mode setting decides whether the protected units remain sellable in that building or disappear from published availability. → Warehouse settings

Where to check

• The Reserved column on the stock list.
• The Reserved figure on the product page, where clicking shows the orders holding the goods. → Stock on the product page
• The integrity check, where reservations are suspected of having drifted from stock: it has dedicated checks for it, such as a reservation without an order, a reservation on an empty location, and over-reserved values.

For developers: reservations are readable per order or per location, as described under reading stock.