Introduction - Picklists

A picklist tells someone in the warehouse what to physically collect and where to find it.

Turning an order into a picking instruction, and why nothing leaves your books yet.

It is the first step of fulfilment and it moves no stock at all: picking is an instruction, and nothing leaves your books until a shipment is recorded.

The Picklists screen listing nineteen picklists with columns for Picklist Number, Picklist Date, Status, Group Type, Warehouse, Assignee, Items Count and Created At. Statuses read Yet to Start and Completed, and the Group Type column shows whether the list was built by sales order or by item. — Group is how the list was batched. Status is how far the picker has got.

What a picklist does

It converts one or more confirmed sales orders into a walking route. Its whole value is that the person on the floor is given a list sorted by where things are, rather than by which customer ordered them.

Sales OrderConfirmed demand
PicklistCollect from shelves
PackageBoxed for despatch
ShipmentStock actually leaves

Picking states

State	Meaning
Yet to Start	Generated, nobody has begun
In Progress	Partly picked
On Hold	Paused, and still holding its lines
Completed	The picker is finished with it, whether or not every line was found in full

Those four are the whole set. There is no cancelled state and no separate short state: a list that could not be filled is still Completed, and the shortfall shows in the picked quantity against the quantity required.

Do you need them

If one person takes an order from screen to box, a picklist is a document with no reader. It earns its keep the moment picking and packing are different people, or the moment one walk covers several orders. Nothing in the product requires a picklist before a shipment, so using them at all is a decision about how your warehouse works rather than a setting you turn on.