Enter your idea

The Core Problem

Our inventory system is showing a mismatch. For one specific item, the system reports a closing quantity of -6,252 (which matches the backorders) but a closing balance of 0. These two figures contradict each other, and we need to fix this discrepancy.

How the Process Should Work

1. I create a Sales Invoice, which generates backorders.

2. The system registers these backorders as -6,252 in the inventory.

3. When I approve the supplier/vendor bill for those backorders, the quantity should automatically return to 0.

4. This process works perfectly for every other item—it just fails for this one specific item.

The Workaround I Tried

Usually, we fix this by:

- Removing the problematic item from the Sales Invoice.
- Approving the vendor bill.
- Re-adding the item back to the Sales Invoice.

This trick normally clears the negative balance. However, it did not work for the -6,252 item. The negative balance stubbornly remains.

The Bigger Worry: Manual Checking

Do I really have to go through every single item in the system one by one to find these errors?

- That would be an enormous, messy job.
- More importantly, if I miss even one item out of thousands, the entire Inventory Item Summary report will be wrong for that month.

The Hidden Timing Trap

It's easy to spot a negative quantity at the end of the month. However, there is a more subtle issue: same-day timing.

If I approve the Sales Invoice before I approve the vendor bill on the same day, the system will show a negative quantity for that specific day. Because it happens intra-day and might correct itself by month-end, these errors are incredibly difficult to detect using standard reports.

This makes the problem even harder to solve, as we can't just look at final numbers—we have to audit the exact order of approvals on specific dates.

This is a great feature!

Can we please get the ability to see what items are being placed on backorder on the invoice before it being approved, at the moment it’s not real clear what is and is not going to backorder until after via product and services screen.

Thanks

look forward to seeing this as this will definitely make our lives easier.

Crucial Feature

We changed to XERO in Feb 2021 and we raised this as a massive issue at the time. We have managed to live with out back orders etc however, we are using excel which is a horrific state of affairs. We played around with re-raising new orders for the back orders but all of this is additional resource which we never had to do.

If 8 of 10 are delivered it used to be so easy to see....

So frustrating not having a back order system. Using draft invoices re badged as BACKORDER is our current workaround. Stupid to not have this feature.

MYOB / Quickbooks/Reckon allows Back Orders even for items not on inventory. Just the quantity allows to know if a Purchase order has been fulfilled or have items on Back Order. we have used Quickbooks for more than 19 Years. WE changed over to Xero as we were told it was great.......to find out we can't do Backorders of items we order VITAL TO KNOWING WHAT SUPPLIES WE ARE WAITING ON. Seriously time to ***** this. things are taking to long to build and our business is being effected by it and we are wasting time having to create more work for ourselves by keeping sperate inventory. when is this going to be resolved.????? we need to know

Go take a look at the backorder capabilities in MYOB - excellent.

we need this to be for purchase orders and sales orders when the orders are incomplete and are still expected in

Aside from not allowing for backorders - incredibly frustrating - you cannot attribute payments to a purchase order. Our factory requires payments in advance on goods to be made up and shipped. Duh!
Furthermore: when looking into a line item from the 'products and services' list (AKA inventory) and when you click on an item (opens up the details of that item) and you can see in the top right there's a 'quantity on order', you would think if you clicked that phrase 'quantity on order' it would open a page or box that showed which PO or PO's that item is included in. Especially when you have a few containers lined up.
Yes, if you buy more subscriptions from XERO you would get these features.....but these were standard in MYOB.........hmmm back to MYOB?

Embarrassing that you don't support backorders. This will be the feature that moves us back to MYOB.

Also Xero should be aware that this idea has been posted multiple times in slightly different ways, so they should accumulate the votes and do something about it. Every single person that has commented on any “backorder” related idea is saying the same thing and we all cannot understand why this is such a hard thing to implement. It would reduce the need for any over-complex, over-priced, over-engineered inventory plug-in that is overkill for most small e-commerce or trading businesses. We just need to be able to handle backorders in a simple way and that surely is not beyond the Xero developers to implement quickly and once and for all as it has been asked about over a number of years without progress. Like others have said, AccountEdge (MYOB) did this backorders job very well in a simple way.

We used MYOB for over 10 years, before moving to Xero, and even when we used the CD rom version it STILL accommodated for backorders. Get with the page XERO.

Critical

This is critical for our business as we do large purchase order.

Better connectivity between the purchase order and the bill - This is one thing that QBO was miles ahead as they have it automated between bill and purchase order.

Having just started using tracked inventory for my own business, this has now become critical for me

Guys,
This is the same issue that has been around for 3 years. This was said to be getting fixed in 2022....
Please can we get an ETA on this!
Thanks,
Lewis