If you need to find all sales orders with backlogs in Business Central, the standard sales order overview is not enough. It only shows the document date, not the number of lines or the shipment dates promised to the customer. To get a usable overview, work from the sales order lines instead of the order headers.
You can do this by opening the item list and drilling into the “Quantity on Sales Order” field. This gives you a list of sales order lines. From there you remove the item filter to see all lines of type Item, then filter on the shipment date and set Outstanding Quantity to greater than zero. The result is a clean list of the lines that are still open and need attention.
Why the standard sales order overview falls short
When the warehouse and planning teams discover a lot of old sales orders with backlogs, the goal is usually to clean them up or to find everything that should have been shipped to customers but hasn’t been.
The problem is that the standard sales order overview only shows the document date. You cannot see how many lines are involved, and you cannot see the actual shipment dates promised to the customer on each sales order line. To work with backlogs, you need an overview at line level where you can filter on the shipment date.
How to build a sales order line overview from the item list
One way to get this overview is to go to the item list and create a sales order line list from there. You can use any item, because you are going to remove the item filter afterwards, so it doesn’t matter which one you start with.
Open the field “Quantity on Sales Order” on the item. This shows all sales order lines for that item across documents. To see everything, remove the item number filter. Now you have all sales order lines of type Item in front of you.
Filtering on shipment date and outstanding quantity
With the full list of lines, apply a filter on the shipment date. For example, you might want to see all outstanding lines up to 1 April. That gives you every sales order line with a shipment date until that date.
Then apply a filter on Outstanding Quantity greater than zero. This matters because some lines are already fully shipped, even though other lines on the same sales order are not. Filtering on outstanding quantity removes the completed lines and shortens the list further, so you only see what is genuinely still open.
What to do with the backlog list
Once you have the filtered list, you can see exactly which items are involved. In a typical case you might find only two different items running down the whole list. From here you go into the documents and decide what to do: handle the dates, adjust what was promised, or have the salesperson contact the customers.
Q&A
Why can’t I see sales order backlogs in the standard sales order overview?
The standard overview only shows the document date at header level. It does not show the number of lines or the shipment dates promised on each line, so you cannot identify backlogs from it. You need a view at sales order line level instead.
How do I create a sales order line overview in Business Central?
Go to the item list and open the “Quantity on Sales Order” field for any item. This drills into the sales order lines. Then remove the item number filter to see all sales order lines of type Item.
How do I filter to see only outstanding sales order lines?
Apply a filter on the shipment date, for example up to a specific date, and set Outstanding Quantity to greater than zero. This removes fully shipped lines and leaves only the lines that are still open.
Why should I filter on outstanding quantity greater than zero?
Some lines on a sales order are already fully shipped while other lines on the same order are not. Filtering on outstanding quantity greater than zero hides the completed lines so you only see the lines that still need to be shipped.
What can I do once I have the backlog list?
You can open the relevant documents and decide how to handle each case. Options include adjusting the dates, updating what was promised to the customer, or having the salesperson contact the customers directly.