A partial delivery arrived. Here is what to do with the rest

You ordered 120 and 96 arrived. Receive the 96 and leave the other 24 outstanding on the order: your Shopify stock goes up by 96, the order stays open for the balance, and those 24 keep showing as incoming stock until they turn up. If the supplier is never going to send them, closing the order short takes that incoming figure back off Shopify.

The delivery note says the other 24 are on backorder, or says nothing at all. Every store that buys stock has this afternoon, and how you record it decides whether your inventory is right next week.

This guide uses Stockroom as the example. The principles hold for any purchase order tool.

Receive what arrived, not what you ordered

The first instinct is to edit the PO down to 96 so it matches the delivery. Do not. The PO is the agreement with the supplier, and the receipt is what actually arrived. Keep them separate and the gap between them is the record of what you are still owed.

So: open the PO, count the 96, and confirm the receipt. Stockroom moves those 96 units from incoming to available at the delivery location. The PO becomes partially received, the 24 outstanding units stay as incoming on the Shopify product page, and anyone looking at the product can see that more is on the way.

If the supplier ships the remaining 24 next week, receive them against the same PO. Every delivery gets its own receipt, with its own date and count, and the PO closes itself when the last unit lands.

Decide about the remainder on purpose

After you confirm a receipt that leaves units outstanding, Stockroom asks what to do with them: keep the PO open, or close it short. A backorder is a choice you make, never something that happens by default.

Keep it open when the supplier has confirmed the rest is coming. The incoming quantity stays on the product, and the PO shows on your dashboard as partially received until the second delivery arrives. Partially received orders have their own badge colour so they are easy to pick out of the list.

Close it short when the rest is not coming. Closing retracts the 24 unreceived units from incoming in Shopify, and the confirmation names the units it is retracting. The order stays in your history with what was ordered and what arrived, so the shortfall is still visible.

If one line is cancelled but the rest of the order is still coming, use Cancel remaining on that line instead. The cancelled units drop out of the totals, the tax and the cost allocation, the incoming for that line is retracted, and the ordered quantity stays on the record so you can see what was originally asked for.

When more arrives than you ordered

Suppliers over-ship too. Stockroom lets the count on a line exceed what was outstanding, on the receive screen and on the POS tile. The ordered quantity never moves, so the PO’s money is unchanged. The extra units are recorded as surplus and go straight to available stock.

The same applies to a product you did not order at all. Scan it, and Stockroom offers to add it to the receipt as a line ordered at zero. Every unit of it is surplus by the same arithmetic. The cost pre-fills from your catalog and you can change it before you confirm.

One thing to know about the cost side: landed cost is spread across the ordered quantities. Surplus units carry the same per-unit freight and duty as their siblings, which means the total allocated on an over-shipped order is a little higher than the actual charge. That is a bounded drift, and it beats one unit costing differently from an identical unit next to it.

If you got it wrong

Receipts can be undone. Every receipt on a partially or fully received PO has an Undo, and the dialog spells out what it reverses: the quantities come back off available, the PO steps back a state, the cost entries withdraw, and the Shopify move is reversed. The receipt is voided rather than deleted, so it stays in the history with a line through it.

A short checklist for the loading dock

1. Count what is in the boxes. Do not read the packing slip and type it in.
2. Receive that count against the PO. Note anything damaged or wrong on the receipt.
3. If units are outstanding, decide: keep open or close short. Ask the supplier if you do not know.
4. If you got extra, receive the extra. Tell the supplier, but do not hide it from your stock.
5. Check the product page in Shopify. Available should have gone up by what you counted, and incoming should show only what is still owed.

Stockroom is free on the Shopify App Store, and purchase orders and receiving are the part that stays free.