Docs
Glossary
Every acronym, status, and piece of warehouse jargon in CanopyWMS, defined in plain English — the page to keep open on your first week.
New to 3PL fulfillment or to CanopyWMS? Start here. Every term the rest of the
guide uses is defined below, grouped by where you'll meet it. When another page
uses one of these words, it links back here.
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| 3PL (third-party logistics) | A company that runs warehousing and fulfillment on behalf of the brands it serves. This guide is written for a 3PL's admins and warehouse staff. |
| BOM (bill of materials) | The recipe for a kit — the list of component SKUs and quantities that make it up. |
| DTC (direct-to-consumer) | Orders shipped straight to individual shoppers, as opposed to bulk wholesale orders to a business. |
| PO (purchase order) | An inbound order telling the warehouse what stock is arriving from a vendor, so you can receive it. See Receiving. |
| RMA (return merchandise authorization) | A tracked return request. It moves Pending → In Transit → Received → Inspecting → Completed as goods come back and are dispositioned. See Returns. |
| SKU (stock keeping unit) | The unique code for one sellable product. Every unit of stock, order line, pick, and inventory adjustment is tracked against a SKU. |
| SLA (service level agreement) | The promised ship-by turnaround, set per client as a target number of business hours (measured created → packed). An order breaches SLA if it ships slower than the target. Distinct from a per-order required ship date, which drives the "past SLA" flag. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| On-hand | Physical units sitting in bins right now. |
| Allocated | On-hand units reserved to open orders. Allocating an order converts available into allocated without physically moving anything. |
| Available | On-hand minus allocated — the sellable stock still free to promise. |
| At Risk | A SKU below its reorder point, or with under 14 days of cover. It's a SKU-list filter toggle (there's no "At Risk" badge) — at-risk rows are flagged by their days-of-stock pill color and a Reorder badge. |
| Days of cover (a.k.a. days of stock) | How many days current sellable stock lasts at recent sales velocity (on-hand ÷ average units shipped/day over the last 30 days). A dash means there's stock but no recent sales to project from. The dashboard calls it "days of cover"; the SKU list calls the same pill "days of stock". |
| Reorder point | A per-SKU on-hand threshold. When on-hand drops to or below it, the SKU gets a Reorder badge — independent of the days-of-cover runway. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Sellable | Stock in this bin counts toward what the sales channels can sell. |
| Pickable | Pickers can route to this bin. A non-sellable bin is also non-pickable. |
| Pick face (vs reserve) | A pick face (forward pick) is the easy-reach, pickable bin a picker pulls from — a PICKING-zone bin. Reserve is bulk/overstock storage. Replenishment tops up the pick face from reserve when it runs low. |
| Lot / lot-tracked | A lot is a tracked batch of a SKU carrying its own number and expiry. A lot-tracked SKU must have a lot chosen when it's received, picked, or restocked; one bin can't hold two lots of the same SKU. |
| Short-dated | Stock on a lot that hasn't expired but sits inside its SKU's minimum-shelf-life window (or on a held lot). Still on-hand, but held out of sellable stock so it isn't shipped too close to expiry. |
| Quarantine bin / Rejected | Damaged or suspect units are marked Rejected during receiving and routed to a quarantine bin — a non-sellable, non-pickable location kept separate from good stock. Quarantine-zone bins can never be pickable or sellable. |
| Non-physical SKU | A SKU that carries no stock and isn't picked or counted (a digital good, service, or virtual charge line). It can appear on orders but skips the warehouse floor. |
| Stock pool | A bin's stock split by lot number, expiry, or pack form. A bin with more than one pool forces the operator to pick which pool to move, because a barcode alone can't say which physical lot or form is in hand. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Pick list / batch | A set of orders grouped to be picked together in one trip. |
| Pick strategy (batch grouping) | How a batch is built: Single = one order per list; Batch (Priority) = several orders picked together by priority; Seed (Optimized) = groups orders by walkway proximity to minimize walking. Chosen in Pick Lists → Create Batch. Distinct from a SKU's lot-rotation strategy (FEFO/FIFO, below). |
| Tote | A barcoded container that carries one order's picked units from the shelf to packing. Each tote is Available, In Use, or Flagged; the barcode links the pack session to the order. |
| Depot | The start/return point of a pick route (the pack/dispatch staging origin). Walking distance is measured from there. It's a special location you place and drag on the warehouse map, so it can be renamed and moved; the Visual Pick Routes map shows it as a green dot labelled with whatever you called it. A warehouse with no depot placed sequences routes from the middle of the layout instead. |
| Special location | A named non-storage marker on the warehouse map: the Depot, the Returns Station where returns get processed, or the Wholesale Station where wholesale cartons and pallets get staged for a retailer's carrier. Not bins — they hold no inventory and carry no scannable label. One of each per warehouse, placed from Locations in the map editor. |
| Bay | The map position (rack section) a route stop lands at. Its bay label is the address a picker walks to. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Disposition | The decision of what to do with a returned unit after inspection: Restock (back to sellable), Quarantine (hold), Dispose (write off), or Return to vendor. Auto-suggested from the inspection result. |
| Inspection result | What you found when checking a returned unit: Undamaged, Opened (still resellable), Defective, or Wrong item. It constrains which dispositions are allowed. |
| Blind RMA | A return that synced in from a sales channel but couldn't be matched to an order. It's not something you create by hand — the Create RMA form always needs an order. |
| Refund type | What the customer gets: Refund (cash back), Store credit, Exchange, Replacement, Warranty (manual review), or No financial action. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Allocation | Reserving available stock against an order so it's ready to pick. |
| Backordered | An order or line waiting on restock because stock wasn't available to allocate or pick. |
| Replenishment | Topping up a pick face from reserve/overstock when it drops below its rule's minimum, so pickers don't run dry. Driven by per-SKU and bulk rules; see Warehouse Ops. |
| Wholesale (WHL) | A bulk business-to-business order rather than a single-shopper DTC one. Marking an order wholesale pulls it out of the retail pick pipeline (only allowed before picking). |
| Postage type | The specific carrier service a label is bought as (e.g. USPS Ground Advantage, UPS Standard), drawn from Stallion's list. Precedence at label time: manual override → automation-rule override → channel shipping-method mapping. |
| Stallion (Stallion Express) | The third-party carrier aggregator CanopyWMS buys every label and pulls every rate through. A client normally has its own Stallion API key (an admin configures it, though a shared fallback key can exist) before any label can be created. |
| Voided label | A shipping label that's been cancelled/refunded. Voided labels are hidden by default in the Shipments report (a "Valid only" chip); voiding can't be undone and invalidates the carrier label. |
| Put-back | Returning already-picked units to stock via a staging bin. Cancelling a picked order, cancelling a pick list, clearing a flagged tote, abandoning a short pick, packing an externally-fulfilled tote, or a lot recall all create put-back work. Recalled units go to quarantine, not a sellable bin. See Warehouse Ops. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Kit / kit parent | A kit (bundle) is a SKU built from component SKUs. The kit parent is the bundle SKU; components pack individually. |
| Bottleneck part | The component in shortest supply relative to how many a kit needs — it caps how many complete kits can be built. |
| Virtual stock | How many complete kits can currently be built, set by the bottleneck part. |
| Unit of measure (UOM) / pack levels | The forms a SKU is handled in — each → inner pack → case → master case → pallet — and how many base eaches each holds. Stock is always counted in base eaches regardless of the form it's stored in. |
| FEFO / FIFO | A SKU's lot-rotation strategy (a client/SKU default, set on the SKU — not in the Create Batch dropdown). FEFO = First Expiry First Out (pick the soonest-to-expire stock first, for expiry-dated goods); FIFO = First In First Out (oldest received first). Separate from the batch-grouping pick strategy above. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Tenant / client (brand) | Your tenant is your entire 3PL company account. A client (brand) is one company you fulfill for. A 3PL has many clients because it warehouses and ships for many brands, and nearly every record is scoped to a client. See Getting started. |
| Median / P90 ship time | Median = the middle ship time across orders. P90 = the time 90% of orders beat (the 90th percentile) — a worst-case read that's less sensitive to outliers than the maximum. |
| IANA timezone | A standard named timezone (e.g. America/New_York, Asia/Tokyo) set per warehouse. It decides which calendar day a shipment's UTC timestamp counts toward for SLA. |
