Hi everyone,

I recently reached out to Zoho Inventory support regarding a workflow challenge and wanted to share both the issue and their response here for visibility.

Zoho confirmed:

“Zoho Inventory does not currently support automatic notifications or triggers to fulfill sales orders based on items received through purchase orders. You will need to manually check stock availability and proceed with fulfilling the sales order.”

Right now, fulfillment is entirely manual:

• Sales Orders can be sent to packing regardless of stock levels
• Receiving inventory does NOT trigger any re-evaluation of open Sales Orders
• There is no system status like “Ready to Fulfill”
• Users must manually:
  • Check stock
  • Decide which orders to fulfill
  • Prioritize orders

This becomes very difficult to manage at scale.

There is no inventory-driven workflow, where:

• When stock is received (PO receipt), the system:
  • Re-evaluates open Sales Orders
  • Determines which orders can now be fulfilled
  • Marks them as ready for packing

I would propose the following enhancements:

1. Inventory-Driven Status

Introduce a system status such as:

• “Ready to Fulfill”

Triggered automatically when sufficient stock becomes available.

2. Allocation (Commitment) Modes on Sales Orders

Allow users to control how inventory is reserved on a per order basis:

Commit and Allow Partial

• Reserve available inventory immediately
• Allow partial fulfillment

Commit Only When Fully Available

• Only reserve inventory when the full order can be fulfilled
• Prevent partial shipments

Do Not Commit

• Do not reserve inventory until fulfillment begins

This would:

• Eliminate manual tracking of fulfillment readiness
• Prevent stock from being effectively “locked” by earlier orders
• Allow smaller, fulfillable orders to ship immediately
• Align Zoho with standard inventory practices

For context, we came from NetSuite which allowed these things (info from Netsuite here just for developer reference):

• Configurable commitment modes
• Automatic allocation/reallocation
• Orders becoming fulfillable based on stock availability

We are happy with Zoho overall however this is one of a few gaps we’ve encountered however. Addressing this would move Zoho Inventory much closer to the capabilities of some of the more advanced inventory systems.

Thank you,
Sonny Jelinek
Jelinek Cork Group