When a builder order is bigger than your stock, the shortfall has two jobs: it stays owed to the builder (a backorder on the sales side) and it has to be bought from a vendor (a purchase order on the buy side). ClearOrder creates both automatically the moment an order goes short — and holds them for a person to approve.
A builder orders 15. You have 6 on the shelf. Six ship today; nine are still owed. That gap is a backorder — and it doesn't take care of itself. Two separate things now have to happen: the nine stay tracked as owed to the builder, and nine have to be purchased from a vendor so you can actually deliver them. Miss either one and the order quietly stalls: the builder waits, and nobody notices until the phone rings.
Here's why backorders are a two-sided problem, why QuickBooks leaves both sides manual, and how the whole thing gets created automatically.
A backorder has two sides
The sales side — what's still owed to the builder
The portion you can't ship now doesn't disappear; it's a commitment. It needs to be recorded against the order so the builder gets the rest, partial deliveries are tracked, and the invoice only bills what actually shipped.
The purchase side — what you have to go buy
To fill the backorder you have to order the shortfall from a vendor. That means a purchase order for exactly the quantity owed — ideally consolidated with every other builder's shortfall for that same vendor, so you cut one clean PO instead of five.
Why QuickBooks leaves both sides manual
QuickBooks Online has no sales order, no backorder, and no committed-stock concept, so there's nothing that natively holds "what's owed" versus "what's on order." (Here's the full breakdown of the missing sales order.) Even in QuickBooks Desktop, tying a backorder to the purchase order that fills it is a manual, remember-to-do-it step. In practice that means:
- Forgotten backorders — the shortfall never gets recorded and the builder simply doesn't get the rest.
- Double buying — someone re-orders material that's already on an open PO because there's no single view of what's covered.
- Overselling — stock that's spoken for gets sold again because nothing marks it committed.
- Spreadsheets — a side sheet of "who's waiting on what," maintained by hand and always slightly out of date.
How ClearOrder creates both sides automatically
The moment an order exceeds available stock, ClearOrder handles the split for you and hands you the result to approve:
- Ships what's available and backorders the rest on the sales side — the delivered portion invoices, the shortfall stays recorded as owed, and partial deliveries are tracked.
- Marks the shortfall committed so the stock you do receive is protected for the builder who's waiting, not resold.
- Consolidates backordered lines by vendor across every builder and auto-generates the backorder purchase orders — you buy exactly what's owed, once.
- Holds the purchase orders for approval — your team reviews the drafted POs before anything goes to a vendor.
Both sides stay linked, so when the material arrives it's obvious which waiting order it fills. Your books stay in QuickBooks Online; the backorder and purchasing logic live in ClearOrder. See how the operations-and-books split works →
Why it matters
Backorders are where supplier promises quietly break. Automating both sides means nothing owed to a builder is forgotten, you never double-buy the same shortfall, and committed stock is never oversold. The next question is what happens when that backordered material shows up — here's how to make sure arrivals fill waiting orders first and backorders shrink instead of pile up.
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