Symptom
Your Purgatory page (Operations > Purgatory) has a backlog of sales orders. Many are old or irrelevant, such as historical imports, test orders, or orders for items you don't track. You want them out of Purgatory, but you don't want them to deduct from your current on-hand or available inventory.
Why it happens
Purgatory holds sales orders that haven't been confirmed (posted) yet, usually because a line item's SKU isn't mapped to a product in Luminous. Orders in Purgatory don't update inventory. Inventory is affected when an order is confirmed and posted. Luminous lets you choose, at confirmation time, whether the order updates inventory. You can also set rules that keep old or irrelevant orders from touching inventory in the first place.
How to resolve
Option A: Confirm the existing orders without updating inventory
- Go to Operations > Purgatory.
- Select the orders you want to clear using the checkboxes, then click Confirm Selected Orders.
- In the Confirm Order Items dialog, check Don't Update Inventory Numbers. The dialog notes that these orders will not affect the inventory. When you select more than one order, a Skip Inventory Update column also appears, so you can choose this order by order.
- Optional: check Exclude in Sales Report if you also want these orders left out of your sales reports.
- Remove any order you don't want to include by clicking the red × at the end of its row.
- Click Confirm Order, then confirm in the pop-up. The orders are posted without changing inventory numbers.
In the Bulk Inline Edit view, once SKUs are mapped, click Confirm Mapped Sales Orders to confirm them.
Option B: Stop old orders from affecting inventory in future
- In Purgatory, click the ⋯ menu at the top right and choose Settings (this opens Settings > Order Processing).
- Use one of these settings:
- Skip Inventory for Orders Older Than (Days): the order is still saved but inventory is skipped.
- Skip Orders Older Than Specified Date: pick a Cutoff Date. Orders on or before that date are dropped completely and not saved to Luminous. You can add per-account cutoff overrides.
- Ignored product names, SKUs and patterns: matching line items are marked as ignored. Use this for things like gift cards, shipping or fee lines.
- Automatically POST orders with no line items / with ignored line items only: these skip Purgatory and, per the on-screen note, don't affect inventory.
- Click Save Settings.
Important cautions
- Settings changes apply only to new incoming orders. Existing orders are not affected, so use Option A for the backlog.
- Automatically POST orders with no un-matched line items will affect inventory, according to the on-screen note. Don't turn it on if your goal is to avoid inventory changes.
- Dropped orders (cutoff date) are not saved. Use the skip-inventory options instead if you still want a record of the order.
- If you want orders to count toward inventory, map the SKUs instead. Add the SKU as an alternate SKU or create the product, then run Automap SKUs and Reprocess Orders from the ⋯ menu. See the existing guides below.
- If Credit hold on sales order post is on (Settings > Order Processing), orders for customers who are past due or over their credit limit won’t post — even when you confirm them by hand — until the customer is back in good standing.
When to contact support
- Orders you confirmed with Don't Update Inventory Numbers checked still seem to have changed inventory.
- You need to clear a very large backlog and Purgatory is slow or the confirm fails.
- Orders keep reappearing in Purgatory after you've confirmed them or changed settings.
Related articles: How to Use Purgatory in Luminous; How to Clean Up Purgatory and Use Data Mapping in Luminous; Skip Orders by Cutoff Date in Sales Purgatory.