Outbound Orders: From Pick List to Bill of Lading

An outbound order is the mirror of an inbound: assets leave, paperwork follows, finance closes the deal. The platform handles each piece so the operator doesn’t reconstruct it from scratch. Every order gets a number in the form OUT-2026-00042, assigned per tenant per year by the database under a lock, so two people creating orders at the same second never end up with the same reference on two different trucks.

Five outbound types

Sale, recycling, internal transfer, return to client and donation. The type controls which documents make sense and how the order behaves. A sale that comes from a Market deal or an Auction win carries its deal along; a sale with no Market or Auction behind it is a direct sale and requires a sale dossier before it can exist — buyer, exact assets, price, invoice and settlement choices. That flow has its own article, Direct Sale, and this one does not repeat it.

The document set

For each outbound, the platform generates the relevant documents on demand — pick list, packing slip, bill of lading, loading report, recycling certificate. Each is a route under /core/outbound/[id]/{type}, rendered server-side and printable. Document templates are tenant-configurable per outbound type via /settings/core/templates, so a BOL for a sale uses different boilerplate than one for an internal transfer.

Pick list and the items tab

The pick list is the warehouse-floor doc: which pallet, which rack, which position, which asset. The scanner’s outbound mode walks it — scan an asset, the platform confirms it’s on the right line, errors if not. On the order itself, the items tab searches across every item on the order by asset tag, serial, model, grade, location or pick/pack state before it shows a page. Moving from picking to picked confirms the pick list is done; moving from packing to ready to ship confirms the pack list is done.

The ready gate

Before an asset can land on a sale, it has to pass the ready gate: grades present, an overall grade that is sellable, a resale disposition, and erasure evidence for anything that carries data. On the data side the platform reads the D-grade: D0 means not erased and fails the gate; D1, D2 and D3 pass, with D3 being certified erasure. A logged refurbishment is not required — “As received” is a valid way to sell a device. Your team sets one knob under /settings/core/outbound: a minimum quality score from 0 to 5, with a switch to hide anything below it. The gate is enforced server-side; the operator can’t accidentally ship a D-grade asset to a buyer who paid for B-grade.

Cancel, revert, and what stays put

An order that has not started shipping can be cancelled with a reason. If that order hangs on a held escrow, the money does not hang with it: the platform sets the escrow to refunded, creates a buyer-refund settlement and records which cancellation caused it. Once an order is shipped, partially shipped or delivered, cancellation is no longer the tool — revert is. Reverting a shipped or partially shipped order puts it back to ready to ship, clears the shipped flags, and returns the actually-shipped assets to their pre-shipment status and workflow stage; an item that never shipped is left alone. Evidence stays as historical record. Held escrow stays held unless a separate escrow path moves money. Where an admin override is required, it needs a real reason. “Because I clicked it” is not a reason. It’s a confession.

Cancellation, any refund registration and the audit record are saved together, including through an integration. If any step fails, the previous state remains intact. Repeating the same request creates no duplicate refund, and a concurrent shipment cannot reopen the cancelled order. This registration does not execute a bank transfer.

Cross-tenant deals ship with protection or not at all

A sale that comes from a Market or Auction deal can only ship when the escrow is held or waived, or the deal carries a confirmed mutual waiver. A missing escrow row is not a waiver, and a no-escrow reason typed into a direct-sale dossier is not valid for a deal outbound. Finance can always tell whether the funds were protected or deliberately settled outside — and if neither is provable, the truck waits.

Carriers

Tracking needs a carrier. A tenant that has not set any up sees “No carriers set up yet” on the tracking form, with a link to Settings → Shipping Carriers, where “Seed defaults” adds the common ones in one click. The list of carriers your team configures is the list your operators can pick from — nothing global, nothing stale.