While many of your Virtual Customers have clear purposes such as "samples" or "trials", all your Virtual Customers can act as buffers in case you need more products to fulfill Customer Orders. 

There are two cases where you are most likely to need to requisition products from your Virtual Customers to fulfill product orders for your real customers:

  1. Additional Orders that occur after you have sowed your Crop to fulfill your Order needs for a particular Harvest

  2. Crop failures or lower-than-expected yields that lower your total yield at Harvest time


When you have Order shortfalls you can make them up from your virtual "buffer" Customer's Crops. In some cases it might take a bit of math, but overall it is quite simple to do. Here are two examples:


Example 1: Easy Math


You have a new Order for 2 large sunflower shoots from a new Customer one day before your Harvest. You add the new Order to SeedLeaf, even though your Crop yield was looks tight. In theory, you are now 2 large sunflower shoots short in fulfilling your Orders.


But your Buffer Customer has an "Order" for 3 large sunflower shoots, so you can "transfer" two of those large sunflower shoots to your new Customer. Here's how:


STEP 1: Go to the Orders page and navigate to the Harvest date in question.

STEP 2: Click on your Buffer Customer to edit the Order

STEP 3: Find your "Sunflower Shoot" Product and change 3 large to 1 large, reducing the order by 2 large sunflower shoot Products

STEP 4: Click Save

    NOTE: If prompted select "This Order only" unless selecting "This and following Orders" makes 

    more sense for your case.


Technically, you haven't done any transfer at all. Rather, you are just eliminating your Product deficit by deleting an Order for a Customer that doesn't even exist and transferring the balance of that Order to a new, real Customer.


Example 2: Some Math


Assuming the same buffer product of 3 large sunflower shoot Products is available as above, you get an order increase from an existing Customer, asking for an additional 10 small sunflower shoot Products. As you have no small sunflower shoot Products in your buffer customer you need to do some math to determine how much of the Buffer Customer Crop you can transfer.


If your small sunflower shoot Product is 100 grams you will need 1000 grams to make up the order of 10 small sunflower shoots. If your large sunflower shoot Product is 400 grams, and the buffer Customer has 3 large sunflower, then you have a total of 1200 grams available to transfer, leaving you with 200 grams. 200 grams is half of a large sunflower shoot product, leaving .5 of a large sunflower shoot Product or 2 small sunflower Products remaining.


You can then adjust your Buffer Customer's sunflower shoot Product order from 3 large to .5 "large" or 2 "small" to balance out your Products.


If needed, you can also do the same thing with your other Virtual Customers, potentially transferring product from your samples or, god forbid, your staff Orders to fulfill Order shortfalls.



Example 3: Transferring Cancelled Products from Orders

When you get a cancelled Order you now have excess Product you can sell. But when you delete that Order (or Products from that Order), how do you keep track of those products? You transfer them to a Virtual Customer.


In this case we can use our BUFFER Customer, which may already have an Order for the Harvest date you are working with.


So, let's say you have a Customer who cancels an Order for two large sunflower, you can remove those Products from that Customer's Order and add them to your BUFFER Order. Then you know you have these products that can be used for additional Orders you might get between sowing and your harvest date. With your BUFFER Customer you set your Product price to $0 since this Customer will not be paying you for you Product - so this keeps your sales projections accurate as well.