When you create new supply for an item in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, your existing sales orders do not automatically pick up that supply. The Reassign Sales Order Quantity report recalculates the assigned quantity across all your sales lines, so new inventory and incoming purchase or production orders get distributed to your customers instead of sitting unassigned on stock.
You run the report by choosing a calculation type (end date or lead time per item) and deciding how to handle soft and locked assignments. You can delete all assignments, respect them, or delete only within a filter so you can reassign one customer at a time in order of priority.
You can schedule the report as a batch job to run automatically at night, and you can filter on items, locations and specific sales orders. This is the practical way to clear a backlog and make sure customers receive as much as possible when supply becomes available.
The scenario: new supply that isn’t reaching your sales orders
Imagine you have an item where the graphical inventory profile looks fine at first glance. If you check the “user sign quantity” field, the profile stays above zero, so everything seems okay. But the moment you deselect that field and look at the raw situation, the inventory goes deeply negative. In this example, you are short 70 pieces on the item.
That means you need to create supply. If it is a planned item, you call your production planners. Otherwise you talk to your purchasers. In the example, there is a firm planned production order of one piece, and to demonstrate the effect we increase it to 60. Now there is more on inventory, and the ending inventory profile looks better than before, even though there is still work to do.
Here is the catch. After you add the supply, your inventory including assigned quantity still shows the old picture. The sales orders have not been reassigned, so you have plenty of inventory that is not allocated to any sales order. The result is that your customers receive less than what is actually possible.
What the Reassign Sales Order Quantity report does
The report recalculates all your sales lines, starting from one end of the document order, and calculates the assigned quantity again for every sales order. When you run it, it goes through all the sales orders and reassigns the available quantity.
After running it, the graphical profile changes. Much more is now assigned, you no longer have a large block of unassigned inventory, and your customers get more than they did before.
Setting up the report
The report gives you several options to control exactly how the reassignment runs.
End date. You choose how far ahead you want to assign sales orders.
Components beyond a date point. On the component level you can look even further ahead than the sales order date.
Soft and locked assignment. This is the assignment flexibility set manually on the sales order lines. You can delete all of them, both soft and locked, you can respect them, or you can respect them within the filter.
- If you filter on a single customer and delete within the filter, only the assigned quantity for that customer is deleted.
- If you delete all soft assignments and then reassign only to one customer, you can prioritise customers in a specific order.
- You can treat soft and locked assignments differently, which gives you flexibility in how strictly the existing allocations are honoured.
Calculation type: end date or lead time. With lead time, instead of looking at a specific locked end date, the report uses a lead time per item. That means you can assign across different periods per item when you run the report on all items at once.
Purchase orders. You can choose to include all purchase orders, only released purchase orders, or no purchase orders at all.
Open versus released sales orders. You can assign only to open sales orders if you do not want to touch released sales orders that may already be locked for inventory purposes. Choosing “only open” means the report only assigns to and maintains open sales orders.
Transfers and production orders. You can also include inbound and outbound transfer demand as well as production orders.
On top of these settings, you can filter on items, locations and the specific sales orders you want to assign to.
Running the report automatically or for a backlog
You can schedule the report as a batch job that runs at night, or as often as you need, so it reassigns everything automatically based on your filters.
If you are in backlog on specific items, a practical approach is to delete everything and then assign per customer afterwards, in order of importance. That way the most important customers get the available supply first.
Q&A
Why don’t my sales orders get the new supply automatically when I add a purchase or production order?
Adding supply does not automatically reassign your existing sales orders. The inventory including assigned quantity keeps the old picture, so the new stock sits unassigned until you run the Reassign Sales Order Quantity report, which recalculates the assigned quantity across all sales lines.
Can I reassign sales orders for one customer at a time?
Yes. If you filter on a single customer and delete the assignment within the filter, only that customer’s assigned quantity is deleted and reassigned. This lets you prioritise customers in a specific order, which is useful when you are clearing a backlog.
What is the difference between soft and locked assignment in the report?
Soft and locked assignment is the assignment flexibility set manually on the sales order lines. The report lets you delete both, respect both, or respect them within a filter, and you can treat the soft and locked assignments differently depending on how strictly you want existing allocations honoured.
What is the difference between the end date and lead time calculation types?
The end date calculation assigns up to a specific date. The lead time calculation uses a lead time per item instead of a fixed end date, so you can assign across different periods for different items when running the report on all items at once.
Can I run the reassignment automatically?
Yes. You can schedule the report as a batch job that runs at night or at any interval you choose, so it reassigns sales orders automatically based on your filters for items, locations and sales orders.