Backorder & Allocation Manager: Decide Who Gets the Stock When There Isn't Enough
When demand outruns supply, allocate on-hand stock to open orders by your own fairness and priority rules, turn the shortfall into tracked backorders tied to inbound POs with expected fill dates, and let an order manager approve who gets what — and who waits — before anything is committed or a customer is told.
A logged-in tool where you import open orders, on-hand stock, and inbound POs, the agent computes an allocation by your priority rules without over-allocating shared stock, flags the backorders and ties each to the PO and date that will fill it, the order manager reviews and approves the who-gets-what plan, and you export a clean allocation/backorder list plus customer notices.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Exports of your open orders/demand, on-hand stock, and open purchase orders (CSV or Google Sheet is fine)
- Your allocation priority / fairness rules written down
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
There is never a good way to allocate stock when there isn't enough of it. The popular product sells out, three big customers and a dozen small ones all have open orders, and a pallet is two weeks out on a PO. Somebody has to decide who gets shipped now, who gets backordered, and who hears "it's coming." That somebody is usually staring at an inventory screen, a stack of open orders, and a gut feeling.
So allocation gets done by whoever shouts loudest, or by whoever's order the rep happened to open first. The same on-hand quantity gets promised to two customers because two people allocated it at the same time. A platinum account waits while a one-off order ships. Backorders live in someone's head or a sticky note, never linked to the PO that will actually fill them — so when the customer calls, nobody can say when. And there's no record of why the stock went where it went, which is exactly the question you get asked after the fact.
Allocation is a fairness decision with real money and real relationships attached. It deserves to run on rules you wrote down and a number that can't be double-promised — not on the order things happened to land in someone's inbox.
What you'll build
A simple internal web app for your customer service, order management, and planning team. You import your open orders (the demand — who ordered what, how much, when, and any priority signal), your on-hand stock, and your open purchase orders (the inbound supply, with expected receipt dates). You tell it your allocation rules — by order date, by customer tier, to hit a fill-rate target, or whatever fairness logic your business actually uses.
The tool runs an allocation pass: it walks your open order lines in your priority order and assigns available stock without ever handing out more than you have. Whatever can't be filled becomes a tracked backorder, and each backorder is tied to the inbound PO and the expected date that will cover it — so the answer to "when will I get it?" is on the screen, not in someone's memory. The order manager reviews the whole plan — who gets shipped, who waits, and why — adjusts anything that looks wrong, and approves. Only then are allocations and backorders committed and the customer notices generated.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you allocate today and who decides, where your orders, stock, and PO data live and exactly how those exports are shaped, your SKU and order-number conventions, your real priority and fairness rules, your typical and peak shortage volumes, and the messy exceptions (kit/component items, minimum order quantities, partial shipments, holds, allocations shared across warehouses). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and gets your thumbs-up before it builds anything, so the allocation logic matches how your business decides — not a generic first-come-first-served template.
From there it walks the agent through the data model, the import of demand and supply, the allocation engine that honors your priority rules and never over-allocates shared stock, the backorder-to-PO linking with expected fill dates, the order-manager approval gate, the customer-notice generator, and the CSV exports. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that uses Google Sheet / CSV imports as the data source and produces a clean CSV allocation/backorder list and customer-notice file in the exact columns your WMS, ERP, or fulfillment team expects — so you can build and run the whole thing this weekend regardless of what system you're on.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
Allocation decides who gets scarce goods, so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's orders and stock, a complete audit trail of who ran which allocation, what they changed, and who approved it, a hard human-approval gate so no allocation or backorder is committed and no customer is told anything until the order manager signs off on the who-gets-what plan, and duplicate guards keyed on the order line and the allocation run so the same stock can't be allocated twice and the same run can't be committed twice.
Who it's for
Customer service leads, order management and fulfillment teams, demand and supply planners, and operations owners at any business that periodically sells more than it can ship — distributors, wholesalers, manufacturers, e-commerce and DTC brands with hot SKUs. If you can explain your priority rules and how your orders, stock, and POs are listed, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll have your first fair, defensible allocation on screen before the weekend's out.