How to find late orders and plan revisions

The order book has three views of the same orders: List, Board and the revisions calendar. The choice stays in the address, so a refresh or a bookmark lands back on it. This page is about using them to find what needs you.

How do you find what is late?

In the List, use the Late filter, which carries a count beside it.

Late means past the expected arrival, or the ship date when there is no expected arrival, and not yet finished. Lateness is judged against your workspace's own calendar day, so it does not flip over at some other timezone's midnight.

An order with no dates reads No date rather than late, because that is a gap in your records rather than a supplier failure. Those are worth fixing: an undated order can never be scored in a supplier's delivery record either.

How do you sort and search the book?

Click a column heading to sort by revise-by date, vendor, PO number, ship date, revision state, receiving state, lateness or amount. Search by vendor or PO number.

The running total of the book is shown per currency and never added together across currencies, which is the only honest way to total a multi-currency book.

What do the two state chips mean?

They answer different questions and are easy to confuse.

Revision state is the change you are asking the supplier for: Revised, No change, Deliver early or ASAP. It describes your request.

Receiving state is the delivery picture: Open, Partially received, Received or Closed short.

An order can be Revised and Open at the same time. One is about paperwork and one is about goods.

What are the exception badges?

Warnings worked out from the order itself: Closed short, Late, No supplier reply, Waiting on sign-off and No owner.

Scanning the board for badges is the fastest triage there is. Each one names a different person's problem:

• Late and No supplier reply are yours to chase.
• Waiting on sign-off is somebody else's, per How to route a purchase order for approval.
• No owner means nobody has been made accountable, which is why it has gone quiet.

What is the revisions calendar for?

Seeing what needs a decision before it is too late, plotted by month against vendor.

It has two grids. Revise by shows which vendor's orders need a revision decision in which month, colour-coded green for on track and amber for asap or deliver-early. Ship and dollars shows how much money is scheduled to ship per vendor per month, with totals.

Click a cell's pencil to open and edit that order, or click a vendor name to jump to that vendor's stock.

That jump is the useful move. It puts the order you are about to revise next to the stock position that should decide it.

Only orders that carry dates appear here. An undated book shows a message saying there is nothing to plot yet.

How should you actually work this?

Once a week, in this order.

Open the calendar and deal with anything whose revise-by date falls this month, because those are the decisions with a deadline. Then filter the List to Late and chase.

Check the late orders against stock before you chase, since a late order covering something with four months of cover is not urgent, and one covering an oversold line is. See How to find items running out, oversold, or not selling.

When a supplier is repeatedly late, their delivery record turns that impression into a number worth quoting, per How to record new terms and check a delivery record.

Can this find me instead?

Yes. Purchase order alerts can watch the book and tell you rather than waiting for you to look. See How to set up the stock and order alerts.