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Which policy applies to a shipment

Three settings can have an opinion about whether a sale may ship when there is not enough stock: the company-wide policy under Settings → Inventory → Inventory Debt, a warehouse's own Shipping below zero (inventory debt) field, and a product's Never ship this product below zero switch. This page explains which one wins when they disagree, and the cases where none of them gets a say at all.

The answer is decided per line, per warehouse. The same product can offer Ship Anyway at one warehouse and not at another, and the same warehouse can ship one product short and refuse the next.

The order of precedence​

Read from the top:

  1. Hard exclusions come first, and nothing overrides them. Serial- and lot-tracked products, consigned stock, and warehouses whose inventory is accounted for outside SKU.io can never ship into debt, whatever the company, the warehouse or the product says. Only a sale is ever eligible, so transfers, manufacturing consumption, vendor returns, adjustments and stock takes always refuse. When a shipment is refused takes each exclusion in turn — what it looks like on screen, why it cannot be unlocked, and what to do instead.
  2. The product can veto. If Never ship this product below zero is on, the answer is Block — even at a warehouse set to Allow, even with the company on Warn.
  3. The warehouse decides if it has been given a policy of its own. A warehouse set to Block, Warn or Allow uses that, regardless of the company setting.
  4. Otherwise the company policy applies. A warehouse left on Use the company default inherits whatever is under When a sale would take stock below zero. If that setting has never been touched, it is Block.

The product level is checked before the warehouse, but it is a veto only. It can force Block; it can never grant Warn or Allow.

None of the three settings decides what happens to a shipment a sales channel has already made. The goods have left, so nothing is refused: what SKU.io cannot cover is recorded as debt whatever your policy says, and the few lines it cannot even do that for — serial-tracked stock it never held, for instance — are listed on the Fulfillment Debt report under Shipped, Not on the Ledger for a person to reconcile. See Debt the sales channel created.

Why a product can only tighten​

There is no per-product way to be more permissive than its warehouse. The switch on the product's Inventory tab is a single Never ship this product below zero rather than a Block / Warn / Allow choice, and its own hint says why: "Leaving it off does not grant permission — the warehouse or company setting still decides."

This is deliberate. Shipping below zero is a decision about how a location runs — whether the people at that dock can be trusted to ship what has not been booked in yet — and a product does not have a dock. A product does have a reason to be an exception in the other direction: an item you never want to oversell, whatever the warehouse's habits. So a product can say never, and nothing else.

If you need one warehouse to ship a product short while the company stays on Block, the escalation path is the warehouse: set its own policy to Warn or Allow under Contacts → Warehouses → Edit. That is the only place a policy can be loosened below the company level.

Where you can see the result​

The precedence is not printed anywhere as a table, but its outcome is visible in two places:

  • On a sales order's Fulfillment tab, a backordered line offers Ship Anyway only when the resolved policy for that product at that warehouse is Warn or Allow. A line with no button has resolved to Block or hit an exclusion — the panel does not say which.
  • In the Fulfill Items dialog, a line that may ship into debt lets you enter the whole remaining quantity; a line that may not caps at what is reserved.

When the answer surprises you, check in the order above: the product's Inventory tab first, then the warehouse's Edit, then Settings → Inventory → Inventory Debt.

Two look-alikes that are not this​

  • Negative Bin Policy on a warehouse's Edit uses the same Block / Warn / Allow words but governs whether a single bin location can be picked below its count. It has no bearing on whether a sale may ship short.
  • A sales channel connection's Allow negative inventory sync option (on the channel's inventory settings) controls what quantity is published to the channel when stock is negative. It has nothing to do with whether SKU.io ships or records a shortfall.

Next steps​

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