Figure 3.3 — The Waybill form. Drawing to be produced after the UI/UX pass: annotated capture of the waybill form naming the parent order, a delivery line against its open quantity, and the warehouse it leaves from.
The waybill is the delivery document [Standard] — the paper that travels with the goods.
- Code — the waybill number, from your sequence.
- Sales Order — the order being delivered against. Choosing it brings the customer and every line still open for delivery.
- Customer — follows the order; shown so the delivery's owner is never in doubt.
- Date — the day the goods leave; stock is dated out on it.
- Promised delivery date — the date this delivery was promised for. It fills in from the order's required date when you pick the order, and you can change it for this shipment — what is saved on the waybill is the promise that was actually made. Reports on delivery performance (OTIF — on-time-in-full) compare this date against the day the delivery completed. Deliveries made before this field existed carry no promise and are simply not counted in OTIF, never counted as late.
- Branch — follows the order where your company tracks branches.
- Narrative — the delivery's own notes: driver, vehicle, handling, instructions at the gate.
The Delivery & Tracking section holds the shipment's fulfilment details:
- Carrier — who carries the delivery: a courier company, or your own truck. Picked from your Carriers list (System Setup → Products → Carriers) — and a carrier that is not on the list yet can be added from the picker itself. The name is recorded on the waybill as it stands when you pick it, so renaming a carrier later never rewrites a delivery that already carries the old name.
- Tracking number — the carrier's reference for this shipment.
- Tracking URL — where the shipment can be followed, when the carrier gives you a link rather than just a number.
Capture them while the waybill is a draft — the carrier is usually known the moment the goods leave. They print on the waybill itself, and when the delivery fulfils a Shopify order they are reported to the store with the fulfilment (§2.14). Once the waybill is posted it is locked, as every posted document is — but these three fields stay maintainable through the Delivery tracking action on the waybill's page, because tracking is delivery information that arrives as the shipment moves, not part of the document's content. A change there is sent to the store as well, updating the fulfilment it belongs to rather than reporting the delivery again.
Each Waybill Line:
- SO Line — the exact order line this delivery fulfils; the link that keeps open quantities honest.
- Product — carried from the order line.
- UOM — inherited from the order and shown, not chosen: a delivery is counted in the unit the goods were ordered in.
- Warehouse — where this line actually leaves from; normally the order's warehouse, changeable where stock sits elsewhere.
- Quantity — what is going out now, up to the open quantity.
- Unit Price — carried from the order, shown as the value reference the following invoice will use.
A waybill has no currency field of its own: it speaks the order's currency, because it is the order being fulfilled. Posting it is the moment stock leaves your books as well as your building.
If a waybill delivers only part of an order line, the rest is not lost: posting records a backorder for the remainder — the quantity still owed, in the order line's unit, at the order's price. The Sales Orders list can show a Backordered quantity per order, and later waybills clear the backorder as they fulfil it. Ask ("how much is in open backorders?", "how old are our backorders?") reads the same records.
An order does not have to be touched by a waybill to become a backorder. Once a day, Blossom looks at every approved order whose required (due) date has passed and opens a backorder for whatever quantity is still undelivered — including orders that were never dispatched at all. The backorder counts from the due date, so its age always reads as how overdue the promise is. Every backorder, however it opened, carries the reason it could not be dispatched in full, judged at the moment it opened: a credit hold on the order, stock (not enough inventory to ship the remainder), or other when neither applied. Ask can split the backorder book by that reason ("how much is in backorders because of stock?"). Backorders recorded before this reason-keeping began simply carry no reason — they are never given one after the fact.