Dropship and Backorder Purchase Automation

A seller who ships some goods from stock and routes the rest straight from a supplier is running two businesses inside one sales order. The stocked half is easy. The direct-ship half turns into clerical work: someone reads the order, decides which supplier can fill it, retypes the lines into a purchase order, remembers to put the customer address in the ship-to instead of the warehouse, emails it, chases an acknowledgement, waits for a tracking number, then pastes that tracking number into a reply to the customer. Multiply by fifty orders a day and the cost is not the typing, it is the misses: an order nobody purchased, a supplier who never confirmed, a customer chasing a parcel nobody can find, and a line sold at a margin that evaporated when the supplier quoted a new price.

SAP Business One does help you create purchase documents from sales demand through the procurement confirmation wizard, and it lets you nominate a drop ship warehouse so no stock movement is expected. Those are real features and this add-on works with them. What they do not do is run continuously without a human starting them, choose between suppliers on your rules, split a line between the stock you have and the quantity you must buy, capture a supplier acknowledgement, write a carrier and tracking number back onto the sales order, or stop a release when the contribution has fallen below your floor.

What ECOSIRE builds

This is a build-to-order add-on. There is no instant download and nothing waiting on a shelf. After a scoping call and a fixed written quote we build the routing, backorder and write-back layer against your company database, your item master, your supplier list and your actual fulfilment rules, install it into your test company first and production second. Typical lead time is two to four weeks from a signed quote.

The build is an SAP Business One extension throughout. Reads and document creation go through the Service Layer (REST), the DI API is used where a document behaviour or client screen requires it, and everything we store lives in UDFs, UDTs and UDOs. Sales Orders (ORDR / RDR1), Purchase Orders, Goods Receipt POs, Deliveries and A/R Invoices remain standard SAP documents, which is what keeps your reporting, approvals and audit trail intact.

Order routing and supplier selection

Each sales order line is evaluated against rules you define. A line becomes a dropship line because of its warehouse type, its item, the customer, the ship-to region, or simply because there is no stock. The engine then chooses a supplier using the preferred vendor on Item Master Data, the lowest landed price across your Business Partner special prices, the fastest lead time, geography relative to the customer, or a supplier stock or availability feed where one exists. Where no rule produces a confident answer the line lands in an exception queue for a human rather than guessing.

Release creates the Purchase Order through the Service Layer with the customer ship-to address on the document, the customer reference where your supplier needs it, and a hard cross reference between the purchase order line and the originating sales order line held in UDFs on both sides. From that point on, quantity changes, date changes and cancellations propagate between the two documents, so a customer who reduces an order does not leave an orphan purchase commitment behind.

Backorder splitting

Mixed availability is the normal case, not the edge case. The engine allocates whatever is available on the item-warehouse row and raises a purchase order only for the shortfall, splitting the sales order line so the stocked quantity can ship today while the balance follows from the supplier. Each split keeps its own expected date, so the customer sees two honest dates rather than one optimistic one, and the delivery documents follow the split automatically.

Acknowledgement and tracking write-back

A purchase order that has been sent is not a purchase order that has been accepted. The add-on records supplier acknowledgement, confirmed quantity and confirmed ship date, and pushes any change onto the purchase order line and the linked sales order delivery date. Unacknowledged orders age visibly instead of sitting silently.

When the supplier ships, carrier, tracking number and ship date are written back onto the sales order and the delivery through UDFs, ready for the customer notification email or the document layout your team already uses. Inbound acknowledgement and tracking can arrive by email parsing, CSV or flat file drop, SFTP, or a REST endpoint the supplier calls, depending on what each supplier can actually manage. Suppliers who can only handle a PDF by email are supported too, because they exist.

Inventory and costing without touching your warehouse

On supplier ship confirmation the add-on can post the Goods Receipt PO and the matching Delivery, or the A/R Invoice, as a paired transaction so cost of goods and revenue land in the same period and inventory nets to zero without stock ever physically arriving. Which documents post, in which order, and against which warehouse are agreed in scoping with your accountant, because the correct pattern depends on your costing method and your period-close rules.

Exceptions, margin and approvals

A release path needs brakes. A margin guard compares the sales order line price to the live purchase cost and blocks release when contribution falls below a configured percentage or amount, routing the line to a manager instead. Dropship purchase orders above a value threshold route through SAP Business One approval procedures before they are sent. An exception dashboard shows unacknowledged purchase orders, late confirmations, short ships, supplier cancellations, price changes beyond tolerance and lines with no eligible supplier, each with an owner and an age.

Who this is for

Wholesalers, online sellers and distributors on SAP Business One 10.0 who route a meaningful share of customer orders directly to suppliers, or who habitually sell items they do not stock. It is most valuable where order volume makes manual purchase order entry a staffing decision, where several suppliers can fill the same item, or where customers expect a tracking number without someone chasing for it.

How delivery works

Scoping is a call of about ninety minutes on your live system: which items and customers are dropship, how suppliers are chosen, what each supplier can receive and send, how you want backorders split, which documents should post on ship confirmation, your margin floor and your approval thresholds. We then send a fixed written quote covering scope, screens, integrations per supplier, postings, install and training, with exclusions stated in writing.

We build against a copy of your database or an agreed test company. Before anything runs in production you get a dry run on your own orders, showing which supplier each line would have been routed to and what purchase order would have been created, so the rules are proven against reality rather than assumed. Installation goes into the test company for user acceptance, then production in an agreed window, with all UDF, UDT and UDO deployment scripted and repeatable across company databases.

The add-on runs on SAP Business One 10.0 on Microsoft SQL Server or SAP HANA, on premise or hosted, and is delivered per tenant.

After go-live

You get a thirty-day support window for defect fixes and configuration adjustment, which is when supplier selection rules and tolerance thresholds usually get their real tuning, plus recorded training for the sales desk, purchasing and administrators. Source code and a full data dictionary are handed over so your team or another partner can maintain the add-on, and additional supplier integrations or a longer support arrangement are quoted separately.