What is sold and not yet shipped

Backlog is tomorrow’s revenue making promises today. May closes with 118 honest lines worth 1,264,500.00, overdue lane first, ghosts swept, and the day stored, because no one can rebuild yesterday’s book from today’s tables.

RuleValue the open order book daily from order lines net of deliveries, with rejection reasons swept, and keep every day, because backlog history cannot be rebuilt.

Neverreport backlog from order totals alone. Lines shipped, rejected, or dead still inflate it, and the number flatters everyone until the quarter needs it.

Backlog is tomorrow’s revenue making promises today. Its honesty depends on subtractions nobody skips.

◆ Open at 31 May, by promisethree lanes, overdue first.

Promised	Lines	Open value
Overdue, promise date passed	23	312,400.00
Due within thirty days	58	621,800.00
Due later	37	330,300.00
Open order book	118	1,264,500.00

Open means ordered minus delivered minus rejected, line by line: the deliveries shrink it and the rejection sweep keeps it honest. The overdue lane is the stuck-order page’s customer-facing echo. Sample values are illustrative, never client data.

◆ The backlog that never shrinksrejected lines linger.

A rejected line keeps its open quantity unless the rejection reason is set, and sales teams skip the field under pressure. Practitioners report backlogs discovered to be part ghost at quarter end. The sweep flags open lines with no activity and no confirmed date, and the book stops flattering.

◆ History, or archaeologythe as-of problem, again.

Backlog as of a past date cannot be rebuilt from the present: lines closed since then erase themselves from every reconstruction. The as-of page walks the failure; this page is the fix, kept daily.

Use case

Problem

Backlog inflates with ghost lines, cannot answer for past dates, and the board sees a number sales already knows is soft.

What we build

The book valued daily from lines net of deliveries and rejections, promise-date lanes, ghost-line sweeps, and every day kept.

What you get

A backlog worth planning on: overdue visible, ghosts swept on schedule, and last quarter’s book still answerable when the question comes.

How much of your backlog would survive a ghost sweep?

We run it once and keep the book honest after.

Talk to us

Terms on this page

SAP: The vendor. Systems, Applications, and Products in data processing.
HANA: SAP’s in-memory database, the platform S/4 runs on.
SD: Sales and Distribution, the order-to-cash module.
VBAP: The order line table the book reads.
rejection reason: The field whose absence keeps dead lines open.
open value: Ordered minus delivered minus rejected, priced.
promise date: The confirmed date the overdue lane measures against.