The "Limit Ship Quantity to Stock not on open Shipments" setting in Unleashed provides enhanced control over how your Stock On Hand (SOH) is allocated to Sales Order shipments. When enabled, this setting hard allocates your available stock to specific shipments at a warehouse level, ensuring that stock committed to one shipment cannot be accidentally allocated to another until the first shipment is dispatched or deleted.
Key benefits
Enabling this setting provides several advantages:
Protected stock allocation: Reserve SOH for specific Sales Order shipments before dispatch, preventing over-commitment of inventory.
Enhanced batch and serial control: Gain greater control over allocating batch and serial tracked stock to specific Sales Orders.
Flexible priority management: Create shipments in order of priority and efficiently manage existing shipments to accommodate urgent deliveries.
Prerequisites
Before enabling this setting, ensure that Order Management is enabled in your Unleashed account.
How To Enable The Setting
From Unleashed's main menu, navigate to Settings > Company.
Select the Configuration tab.
Confirm that Order Management is enabled.
Go to the Settings tab.
Locate "Limit Ship Quantity to Stock not on open Shipments" and toggle it on.
Click Save.
Important: This setting can be enabled or disabled at any time. However, changing the setting will not retrospectively update stock allocations on existing shipments; it will only apply to shipments created after the change.
Understanding Shipment Behaviour
An "open" shipment is one that has been created but has not yet been dispatched or deleted.
When the "Limit Ship Quantity to Stock not on open Shipments" setting is enabled
The "Ship" quantity on a new shipment will only be populated with SOH that is not already allocated to other open shipments in the same warehouse.
This allocation is calculated once at the point of shipment creation and does not automatically recalculate based on future activity.
If all available SOH is already allocated to open shipments, the "Ship" quantity will populate with zero.
If you attempt to manually increase the "Ship" quantity beyond available SOH, you will receive this error: "Cannot update shipment quantity to be higher than the on hand quantity not already on open shipments."
You must reduce the "Ship" quantity back to its original value until additional SOH becomes available.
When the "Limit Ship Quantity to Stock not on open Shipments" setting is disabled
Current SOH will be used to fulfil the required "Ship" quantity on a shipment, regardless of quantities allocated to other open shipments.
If SOH is over-allocated across open shipments, the "On Ship" value will be displayed in red as a warning.
Allocating Batch and Serial Numbers
When this setting is enabled, you can hard allocate specific batch or serial numbers to shipments without needing to dispatch them immediately. This provides flexible control over which stock goes to which customer.
To allocate Batch or Serial Numbers:
In the Sales Order, go to the Order Lines tab.
Tick the checkbox for each order line requiring allocation to a shipment.
Hover over the Action Cog above the checkboxes and select Ship.
A shipment will be created with the "Ship" quantity populated based on available SOH not allocated to open shipments.
Along the batch or serial tracked product's shipment line, select the Batch or Serial field.
In the selection window:
For batch numbers: Select "All Available Batches" and enter the quantity being allocated per batch
For serial numbers: Select "All Available Batches" and tick the checkbox for each serial number being allocated.
Save the shipment.
🤓 Tip: Allocating serial or batch numbers to a shipment automatically allocates them to the Sales Order as well.
Allocation indicators
Any subsequent Sales Order or Shipment will display an orange warning icon in the batch/serial selection windows to indicate that specific batch or serial numbers are already allocated elsewhere, prompting you to select alternatives.
When using the "Assign Oldest Serial Numbers" or "Assign Oldest Batch Numbers" actions in the Sales Order's Order Lines, only currently unallocated serial or batch numbers will be assigned.
For more detailed information, refer to Batch Tracking and Serialized Products.
Managing Open Shipments with Limited Stock
Once a shipment is created, its "Ship" quantity remains fixed unless manually amended. Updates to other shipments or creation of new shipments will not affect existing "Ship" quantities.
If you need to dispatch a shipment but insufficient SOH is available, you have three options:
Increase stock levels: Receipt, transfer or assemble more of the ordered product to increase SOH in the shipping warehouse.
Adjust existing shipments: Edit other open shipments to decrease their "Ship" quantity for the low-stocked product.
Delete unnecessary shipments: Remove other existing open shipments for the same low-stocked product.
By actively managing your open shipments, you can maintain control over stock allocation and ensure priority orders are fulfilled first.
🤓 Tip: Review the "On Ship" quantity on shipments to see the total units currently allocated to open shipments from the same warehouse.