Pre-Orders & Made-to-Order Selling: Deposits, Lead-Time Promises, Order Backlogs, Cash Before Cost, Cancellations & Batch Triggers

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Split twelve pre-orders into cash taken at order and balances still to collect, report the cash of one week with SUMIFS and measure how much of the order value is already paid.
• Turn a queue of ten made-to-order lamps into cumulative units, promised ship dates on working days and an on-time status, then promise a date for a new order.
• Roll the backlog of a made-to-order product forward week by week, express it in weeks of capacity, decide when to pause sales and estimate how long it takes to work it down.
• Follow the weekly cash of a pre-sold batch: net cash flow, the cash position after eight weeks, how far customer money covered the batch bill and the cash left at the end of the bill week.
• Measure how cancellations rise with the wait, work out refunds under fictional shop terms, total the refunds owed and estimate cancellations for the next orders.
• Check five pre-ordered products against the minimum batch their maker accepts, work out the units still needed, the days and the date until each batch can start, and count the products ready now.
• Price an early-bird offer: margin per unit at full and discounted price, how many more units the discount needs to earn the same margin, and the deepest discount that keeps a minimum margin.
• Build the eight-week dashboard of the pre-order shop: on-time rate, backlog in weeks of capacity, the closing cash position and a chart of new orders against units shipped.