I wrote this on a plane because I realized I was heading on vacation and hadn’t yet written a #TipTuesday post yet. I’m on a roll now and didn’t want to skip a week!! So, this is pretty short, and maybe everyone else knows about this but it was new to me so I thought I would share.

Lookup Window shortcut

On the Items lookup window, as far back as GP 2013 at least (where these screenshots below come from), there is an icon beside the New and Open buttons on the top right-hand side. It’s a generic looking icon, and there is no tooltip to tell you what it is. Honestly, I never noticed it before.

The button opens the Inventory Available To Promise window. Who knew?

Available to Promise (ATP) window

Here’s a very brief primer on what you can do in this window. It’s one I forgot about and realized it’s pretty handy for a snapshot of where a part is and what’s going on with it.

First, the information is shown per warehouse, so you select a single warehouse to view information for and then the window will refresh to display various bits of information. Here’s a short description of the fields:

• On Hand, Allocated, and Available quantity info, which are also available in a number of other inventory inquiry windows.
• Free Forward, which is (essentially) what would be available if every receipt was received, every sales order was fulfilled etc. – if everything on order today was completely filled, this is how much you’d have on hand.
• Released PO quantity shows how much is on order, not including items from released POs that may be on an unposted receiving transaction.
• Pending quantities from inventory, purchasing, and assembly receipts (i.e. unposted).
• And finally, sales returns, sales backorders and unallocated sales orders for that item.
• The net of all of that is a “Current ATP” – if a customer called right now, how much could you promise them right this minute.
• The grid shows the transactions that are in the pending section, that you can drill back into (“entry” window or “inquiry” window options).

At the bottom is my favourite part: you can enter a quantity that you need and click on the Calc. Available Date for it to tell you when that much would be available based on the dates of released POs or other information like Assembly receipts.

Pretty neat eh? (Small things amuse small minds!)