Reservations

A reservation is a quantity of an item that the seller puts aside for a customer who wants to purchase the items at a later date. Reservations take inventory out of available inventory to cater to a customer's specific demand. A reservation can be upgraded to an order or canceled.

In Sterling Order Management System Software, demand is composed of different types of specific entities called “demands.” One type of demand is a reservation. How do you guarantee a customer that inventory has been put aside for them? One way is to create a reservation on the system, which the customer must confirm or cancel.

For example, you manufacture snow shovels. Your customer, the ABC Hardware store, "reserves" 150 snow shovels for November 5th. You create an order for 150 snow shovels in "reserved" status. The ABC Hardware store can either cancel the reservation or have the snow shovels shipped.

A reservation can be scheduled to expire by passing a reservation expiration date or time. The expiration date can be specified in an individual order, or a default expiration time can be configured, after which existing reservations are cancelled. This feature allows you to clean up reservations that may not have been cancelled for any reason.