If you have an order where you can ship part of it now, but not all of it, Actinic gives you the option of splitting the order into two orders: one order that you can ship now, and one 'back-order'.
This process means that you can ship one part of the order now, and take appropriate payment, and then ship the back-order when the items become available.
Note: This feature is enabled/disabled with the 'Allow Back-ordering' checkbox in 'Business Settings | Order Processing'.
In order to create a back-order, you need to mark some of the lines within an order as shipped. This is discussed in Marking Order Lines As Shipped. The lines that you mark as shipped are the ones that are available now. The lines that remain unshipped will be the ones that will form the back order.
Once you have marked the lines as shipped, click 'Close' to go back to the order summary. Then, with the order highlighted, click the 'Back Order' button, or go to 'Operations | Back Order'.
This will launch the 'Back-order Adjustments' window. This window is used to split the original shipping and handling charges between the original order and the back-order. By default, when you edit the shipping charges for either part of the order, the other field will automatically adjust so that the total shipping charge remains the same. If you want to stop this from happening, select the 'Check this to Override the Maintenance of the Overall Total Values' box. This will mean you can manually enter how much shipping and handling you want to charge on each part of the order.
Click 'OK' and the back-order will be created.
This back-order can be processed as a standard order once the items are available to ship.
Back-orders have the same order number as the original order, but with a suffix of '\B1' added onto the end of it. They appear in the order summary with a little black arrow in the icon.
Back-orders share the same contact details, payment history and email history as the original order.
In the original order, the items that have been moved to the back-order are marked as 'Back-ordered' in the 'Line Items' tab and in any reports generated. You can see the proportion of the order that is back-ordered by looking at the 'Progress And Payments' tab.
When you generate a packing list or an invoice for the original order, full details about the back order are included onto the bottom of the report in a section that starts "The following items will follow later as part of Order Number:".
If you are taking payments offline (e.g. using the 'Credit card details captured for later processing' payment method), then when you click 'New Entry' in the 'Payment History' for the original order, it only makes an entry for the value of the original order. The payment status of the order will change to 'Partial Payment Received'.
The payment status of the back order always reflects the payment status of the original order. It will always say 'Parent Status (nnnn)', where 'nnnn' is the payment status of the original order.
To move between the original order and a back-order quickly, you can click the 'Related Orders' button at the bottom of the 'Order' window. This brings up the 'Related Orders' window. Highlight an order and click 'View Order' to switch to that order.
It is possible to make a back-order of a back-order. If you do this, then the suffix of the new back-order is '\B2' (and then '\B3' and so on for each new back order you create).
The original order will not move into the 'Completed' tab of the order summary until the criteria for being complete (as described in Order Processing Overview) are true for all parts of the order.