Coming soon: Major improvements to reservation and sales workflows offer more clarity and control over how inventory reservations are created, adjusted, tracked, completed, and logged across layaways, special orders, and work orders. Register workflows like completing a sale, issuing a refund, or voiding a transaction will also be updated for more consistency across Retail POS.

What’s changing with reservation and sales workflows?

When the updates to reservation and sales workflows are available in your Retail POS account, you’ll see new functionality and improved behaviors in the register, Service workbench, purchase orders and transfers, inventory logs, and reports:

More predictable reservation behavior

• Reservations are now confirmed without needing to complete a sale. Cancelling a sale will no longer cancel layaways or special orders that were created after the sale was started. They must be cancelled manually.

• Previously, any change to a reservation line item with insufficient reserved inventory could cause it to reserve any recently received units. Now, only the following actions will adjust the reserved quantity:

  • Adding a layaway, special order, or work order line
  • Editing line quantity
  • Changing the shop of a line
  • Deleting a line
  • Marking a special order as ready
  • Moving a work order between estimate and non-estimate statuses
  • Changing the customer of a work order
  • Archiving or restoring a work order

• Attaching layaways and special orders to a sale no longer changes the reservation status or reserves additional inventory. If there isn’t enough reserved inventory, the remaining quantity will be removed when the sale is completed.

• A Not Ready button appears when units are reserved for a special order, allowing them to be restored to inventory.

• Adding an item on the Special order tab of the register will increase the quantity for an existing special order of the same item, if it isn’t attached to a sent purchase order or transfer or manually marked as Ready. Otherwise, a new special order line will be created.

• Adding a duplicate special order item to a work order now creates a new line instead of updating the existing one. The line quantity can be adjusted if needed.

• Layaways and special order tabs in the register now support the Create Separate Sale Lines When Adding Units General Options setting. Layaways also support Create Separate Sale Lines When Adjusting Quantities.

• Archiving an item releases all reserved units before inventory is voided.

More predictable sale and void behaviour

• Completing or voiding a sale will automatically restore any archived items on the sale.

• Voiding a sale restores the reservation state of any layaway, special order, or work order lines completed by the sale.

• Refunding a sale that caused negative inventory causes the negative inventory to be cancelled. Voiding the refund will cause this negative inventory to be restored.

More accurate cost tracking for reservations and sales

• If reservation quantity is reduced, inventory will be restored in reverse FIFO (first in, first out) order so older units remain reserved.

• Referenced refunds and sale voids will restore inventory to the original lot instead of creating new lots. Partial refunds restore inventory in reverse FIFO order, so older units remain sold. Multiple partial refunds will restore the correct quantity to each lot in order.

• Cross-location refunds create new lots in the receiving location matching the original FIFO order of the sale.

• Voiding a refund will attempt to remove the exact units added by that refund, before applying FIFO order. If insufficient unit quantity remains, voiding a refund will cause negative inventory to be created against the refund with a new Voided refund status.

Alignment of special order and purchase order workflows

• If a special order is linked to a purchase order or transfer, changes made to the quantity will sync while the purchase order or transfer is unsent. Adding a special order to a sent purchase order won’t change the order quantity. Quantities on a sent purchase order must meet or exceed the amount needed to fulfil the special order. Multiple special orders for the same item on a purchase order or transfer will be fulfilled in order of oldest to newest.

• Special orders can now be partially received. Units will be automatically reserved as they arrive and the special order will be marked as Ready once the full quantity has been received. On the Purchase Orders > Special Orders page in the Special Orders to Call table, partially received reservations will be color-coded red, fully received orders yellow, and called special orders green. Special orders will show a new Ordered, partially received status for partially reserved quantity.

• Auto-receiving, or automatically receiving inventory from a purchase order or transfer to complete a sale of a unit with insufficient quantity on hand, now excludes quantities allocated to special orders so items remain reserved.Over-received quantities will no longer be auto-received. Labels won’t be added to the print queue for auto-received units.

• You can now create special orders for non-inventory items. They'll be automatically marked as Ready when sufficient quantity has been received from a purchase order or transfer, but no actual unit reservations are tracked.

Better visibility into reserved inventory and costs

• The register, Service workbench, and layaway, special order, and work order reports will now display the number of units that are reserved for each line.

• Layaway, special order, and work order reports display the average of the actual cost of reserved units and an estimated cost of the remaining desired quantity, based on the account cost method and cost control settings.

• Reservations, sales, refunds, and voids create a single grouped inventory log entry per item, showing the total change in quantity. Exchanges will create a separate log entry for units added and for units removed.

• Completing a sale which completes one or more fully reserved layaways, special orders, or work order lines will create an entry in the Inventory history log. If no additional quantities are needed, the Change in QTY column will show “–”.

• Inventory added or removed from lots for reservations, sales, refunds, or voids will now create lot adjustment logs.

• Inventory logs for reservations, sales, refunds and voids will now include the customer’s name and link to the customer page.

• Inventory logs for reservation for work orders will include a link to the work order in the Source column.

• Reservation changes now have new, more detailed log statuses (instead of Sold, or Sale cancelled, voided, or line removed):

  • Reserved for Layaway
  • Reserved for Special Order
  • Reserved for Workorder
  • Cancelled reservation for Layaway
  • Cancelled reservation for Special Order
  • Cancelled reservation for Workorder

• Refund types now have new, more detailed log statuses:

  • Refunded (cross-location)
  • Refunded (unreferenced).

• Void types now have new, more detailed log statuses (instead of Sale cancelled, voided, or line removed):

  • Voided sale
  • Voided refund
  • Voided refund (cross-location)
  • Voided refund (unreferenced)

When will I see the updates in my account?

The updates to reservation and sales workflows are being tested with a cohort of private beta testers and will be rolling out gradually to all merchants over the summer (winter in the APAC region).

When the changes have been activated in your account, Retail POS will be automatically updated. No action is required.