Partial Delivery Workflow

A customer ordered forty units and you have twenty-two on the shelf. They want the twenty-two now. By the end of this guide you will have shipped and billed what you have, left the rest of the order visibly open, shipped the balance when it arrives, and closed the order cleanly. Each shipment takes about the same five minutes as an ordinary invoice; the skill is in the tracking between them.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd has an order from a corporate customer for 40 flagship smartphones at RM 3,800 — RM 152,000 net, RM 9,120 SST at 6%, RM 161,120 in total. Branch GS-KV-01 has 22 in stock; the rest arrive from the distributor in about a fortnight. The customer is opening an office and would rather have 22 today than 40 in two weeks.

How BigLedger actually splits an order

There is no “partial delivery” mode to switch on, and no backorder document. The mechanism is simpler than that, and it lives in one place:

A sales invoice knocks off a quantity from a sales order line, not the whole line. When you knock off the order in the invoice’s KO For tab, the grid gives you three columns per line: Base Qty. (what was ordered), Bal. Qty. (what is still un-invoiced), and an editable Knockoff Qty. you can set to anything from zero up to the balance. Set it to 22, and the order line keeps a balance of 18.

That is the whole feature. Everything else in this guide is bookkeeping around it. One thing to know about the plumbing, because two of the steps below depend on it: the balance the grid shows is an open-queue row that the order’s FINAL created for the Sales Order → Sales Invoice pair in your company’s Knock Off Configuration. Each downstream document type gets its own row — the delivery note in Step 3 reads a different one from the invoice — and the invoice’s knock-off reduces only the invoice row.

    flowchart TD
  SO["Sales Order · 40 units<br/>FINAL · posts nothing"]
  SO -->|"KO For · Knockoff Qty 22"| SI1["Sales Invoice 1<br/><b>22 units out of stock</b><br/>RM 88,616"]
  SO -->|"KO For · Knockoff Qty 18<br/>(two weeks later)"| SI2["Sales Invoice 2<br/><b>18 units out of stock</b><br/>RM 72,504"]
  SO -.->|"balance visible in<br/>SO Line with SI KO"| BAL["Bal. Qty. 18 → 0"]

Two consequences worth holding on to:

Each invoice takes its own stock out, on its own date. There is no partial stock movement waiting to happen. Invoice 1 removes 22 handsets today; invoice 2 removes 18 in a fortnight. Neither invoice posts a cost-of-goods-sold journal — that is a month-end job in the Financial Report applet, not part of FINAL.
The order never “completes” by itself. Its balance quantity goes to zero when the last invoice knocks it off, or you close the remainder by hand. Nothing else changes its posting status — it stays FINAL throughout.

Before you start

A FINAL sales order for the full quantity. Do not shrink the order to what you can ship — the order is the customer’s commitment, and shrinking it loses the record of what they actually asked for.
An enabled Sales Order → Sales Invoice row in your company’s Knock Off Configuration (Organisation > Company > Knock Off Configuration). This is what makes the order’s lines appear in the invoice’s KO For tab at all — and, as it happens, what makes an open order count against available stock. If the row is missing, the order finalises normally and the invoice simply cannot find it. Add the Sales Order → Goods Delivery Note row too if you use delivery notes (Step 3).
Stock at the line’s location for the quantity you are about to invoice. The invoice refuses to finalise otherwise, with Not Enough Stock for item … — unless your tenant has switched the stock check off, in which case it lets you go negative and says nothing.
An agreement with the customer about delivery charges. Two deliveries usually cost more than one, and that is a commercial conversation to have before the first van leaves, not after the second invoice.

Step 1: Keep the order whole

Sales > Sales Order (Internal) > Sales Order > (your order)

The outcome: a single order for 40 that everyone can see is not finished.

Raise the order for all 40 units and finalise it as normal. Then use the two fields that exist for exactly this:

Sales Order Status — your tenant’s own list, configured under Settings → Sales Order Status. A value like Part-shipped is how your team finds these orders without reading every one.
Remarks — one plain sentence: “22 units delivered 15 Sep; balance 18 expected from distributor week of 29 Sep.” Update it each time. This is what the person covering for you on a Friday afternoon will read.

The FINAL order has already reduced available stock by 40, so nobody can promise those handsets to another customer. That is the protection you get from keeping the order at full quantity. The arithmetic behind it: BigLedger’s available quantity is stock on hand, minus the un-invoiced balance of open sales orders, minus any reservations. So after Step 2 the order holds back only the 18 still to ship — it does not double-count the 22 that have already left.

Step 2: Invoice the part you can ship

Finance > Sales Invoice (Internal) > Sales Invoice > Create > KO For > Sales Order

The outcome: 22 handsets billed, out of stock, and the order showing a balance of 18.

Create the invoice and pick the customer. Open KO For, search for the sales order, and look at the grid. Each order line shows Base Qty. 40 and Bal. Qty. 40. Click into Knockoff Qty. and change it to 22.

The Knockoff Qty. field will not let you over-ship. It accepts anything from zero up to the balance quantity and silently refuses a larger number. If you find yourself unable to type the figure you want, check the balance — something has already been invoiced against that line.

Add the 22 serial numbers on the line’s Serial Number tab. Check the delivery address and the transaction date on Main Details, check the E-Invoice tab if you submit to LHDN, then SAVE and FINAL.

Dr  Debtor — trade retail                RM 88,616.00
    Cr  Sales — smartphones                       RM 83,600.00
    Cr  SST output tax                            RM  5,016.00

22 handsets leave GS-KV-01. The order line now shows Bal. Qty. 18.

If FINAL succeeds but the Trace Document tab shows no journal a minute later, the posting job failed afterwards — usually a missing default GL code for the customer or the sales account. FINAL is not blocked by that; find and repair it in Financial Report > Error Checking > Trace Document.

Step 3: Give the customer paperwork for this drop

Inventory > Goods Delivery Note (Internal) > Create > KO For Sales Order Item

The outcome: something for the customer to sign for these 22 units.

A goods delivery note carries the customer, the address, the lines and the signature block, and it knocks off the order’s open lines the same way the invoice does — from its own queue. The KO For Sales Order Item tab reads the Sales Order → Goods Delivery Note row, which invoice 1 did not touch, so it offers you the full 40, not 22. Take 22. If you take 40 here, the delivery note is wrong by 18 and the second drop’s paperwork will find no balance left to knock off.

A delivery note moves no stock. Its quantity and amount signums are both zero — finalising one changes nothing in your inventory or your ledger. The stock left in Step 2, on the invoice. Use the delivery note for the customer’s copy and the driver’s proof of delivery; never as the record that the goods have gone.

If your branch runs drivers and vehicles, this is also the point to hand the drop to dispatch — and it does not happen by itself. Finalising the invoice puts nothing in the Pick Pack Queue. Open the invoice’s Delivery Details tab, switch Require Delivery on for the lines going out, check Qty To Deliver (it defaults to the line quantity — 22 here), and click Send To Queue. That button writes the pick-pack queue rows from which dispatch creates a delivery job with Create Delivery Job — in the Delivery and Installation applet, or on the invoice applet’s own Pick Pack Queue screen. (Invoice lines cannot be sent on to the Warehouse Management picking queue; that button exists only on the Sales Order applet.) Click it once: a second send after a page reload adds to the queued quantity rather than replacing it. From there the job goes onto a trip — see Delivery and Installation Scheduling.

Step 4: Watch the balance

Sales > Sales Order (Internal) > SO Line with SI KO

The outcome: a single screen you can run every Monday that tells you what you still owe your customers.

SO Line with SI KO lists order lines against invoiced quantity, one row per line. Your order appears with Qty Ordered 40, Qty Received 22, Qty Outstanding 18, and the invoice numbers in the SI No’s column. (Yes, the column is labelled Qty Received — it means the quantity invoiced so far; the screen was built from the purchasing report of the same shape.) Queue Closed Status reads Open, and a red Close button sits at the end of the row for as long as there is a balance. Filter it by branch or by date range and it becomes your open-commitments list — the orders where a customer is waiting for something.

This is a better list than the order listing itself, because an order with one unit outstanding looks exactly like an untouched order until you open it.

Step 5: Ship the balance

Finance > Sales Invoice (Internal) > Sales Invoice > Create > KO For > Sales Order

The outcome: the order closed by the second invoice.

Two weeks later the 18 handsets arrive. Create a second invoice, knock off the same sales order, and this time the grid shows Base Qty. 40 and Bal. Qty. 18. Take all 18.

Serial numbers, dates, e-Invoice tab, SAVE, FINAL. 18 more handsets leave stock and RM 72,504 is added to the customer’s account. The order line now reads 40 ordered, 40 invoiced, 0 outstanding on SO Line with SI KO, and the Close button is gone because there is nothing left to close. Send the second drop to the queue from this invoice’s Delivery Details tab, as in Step 3.

Step 6: Close what will never ship

Sales > Sales Order (Internal) > SO Line with SI KO > close the line

Sometimes the balance is never going to ship: the customer cancelled the rest, the item was discontinued, four units of the forty turned out to be the wrong colour. Leaving the line open is not harmless — it holds available stock that could be sold to someone else, and it keeps a commitment on your outstanding list that nobody is going to act on.

Close the line from SO Line with SI KO: the Close button at the end of the row. Write the reason in the order’s remarks first, because the closed line will not explain itself.

What Close does is precise and small. BigLedger copies the line’s open-queue row into a closed queue and deletes the open one. Three things follow: the invoice’s KO For tab stops offering the line; the outstanding 18 stop counting against available stock; and the row on SO Line with SI KO now shows Qty Closed 18 and Queue Closed Status Closed, highlighted red. The order itself is untouched — still FINAL, still 40 on the face of it, still linked to the invoice for 22. Close acts on the invoice queue only: if you also raise delivery notes against orders, the line’s delivery-note balance is a separate row and stays open.

Closing a line is not voiding the order. VOID cancels the whole order including the parts you already invoiced — which does not undo those invoices, and leaves you with an order that says nothing happened and two invoices that say a great deal happened. Close the line; never void a part-shipped order.

What success looks like

Run these four after the final shipment:

SO Line with SI KO for this order shows Qty Ordered 40, Qty Received (invoiced) 40, Qty Outstanding 0 — or, if you closed the balance, Qty Outstanding 0 with Qty Closed showing what never shipped.
Stock Balance for the item at GS-KV-01 dropped by 22 on the first invoice date and 18 on the second — two movements, matching the two vans.
The customer’s Statement of Account shows two invoices totalling RM 161,120, which is what the order said.
The order’s remarks tell the story: two dates, two quantities, one sentence. Someone auditing this in six months has everything they need without opening a single other screen.

Common mistakes

Shrinking the order to what you can ship today. You lose the record of what the customer asked for, the available-stock reservation for the balance, and any chance of tracking the outstanding commitment. Keep the order whole and knock off partially.

Raising a second order for the balance. Now you have two orders, two histories, and a customer purchase order number on both. The balance already lives on the first order; use it.

Waiting for the delivery note to take the stock out. It never will — both signums are zero. If your stock looks high after a part shipment, check whether the invoice was actually finalised.

Taking the full order on the delivery note. The delivery note’s KO For tab reads its own queue, which the invoice never reduced, so it offers 40 when you have shipped 22. Type the quantity you are actually handing over.

Finalising and waiting for dispatch to see it. Nothing reaches the Pick Pack Queue until someone clicks Send To Queue on the invoice’s Delivery Details tab. If dispatch says the invoice is not in the Job Sales Invoice list, that is the first place to look — and if they say the quantity is doubled, someone clicked it twice.

Invoicing all 40 and shipping 22. The system is perfectly happy to do this and the customer will not be. Forty units of stock leave, forty units of revenue post, and eighteen handsets sit in your warehouse recorded as sold. Every stock count after that is wrong.

Voiding a part-shipped order to “reset” it. The invoices already posted stand. Close the outstanding line instead.

Forgetting the second delivery charge. Two drops, two costs. Add the delivery item to the second invoice if that is the deal, or absorb it knowingly — but decide, rather than discovering it at month end.