When to use this: a customer asked for something you didn't have. Note it down in the system — not on paper — so it gets picked up when you next order.
Steps
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Note it while billing. Press F1 and search for the product. Every result row carries a Mark shortage button on the right. Click it, type how many units the customer wanted, and click Log shortage.
In the picture, 1 is the Mark shortage button — it sits on every search result, not only the ones that are out of stock, so you can record demand you could only part-fill. 2 confirms which product you are logging, 3 is the quantity the customer actually asked for, and 4 saves it.
This works offline. A shortage logged while the counter is offline is buffered on the device and sent up when the connection returns.
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Review the book. Open Reports → Shortage Book to see what people have been asking for, how often, and when.
- 1 — the status filter (Pending here) and Create Purchase Orders, which turns everything currently listed into draft POs in one go.
- 2 — the From / To date range, the item count and Refresh.
- 3 — Export CSV, Export Excel and Export PDF.
- 4 — entries are grouped by supplier, with a running N items · N units total. BitMed works the supplier out from who you last bought that product from, which is why the line reads inferred — last purchased from. Anything it cannot resolve collects under Unassigned supplier, where you pick the supplier yourself.
- 5 — Order from <supplier> raises a purchase order for that one group.
- 6 — the products themselves: Requested Qty, Times Requested (how many separate customers asked) and Last Requested. Times Requested is the column that tells you whether one customer wanted a hundred, or a hundred customers wanted one.
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Order it. Your shortage entries feed straight into purchase-order suggestions (the shortage order assistant, → PUR-02) and into demand analytics (→ RPT-07).