Every record you open under Shipping & Receiving carries a status in the chip next to its number. The status is not decoration. It is the single thing that decides whether you are allowed to touch the stock, and getting it wrong is how the same units end up sold twice.
Read this once. It applies to every outbound job you will ever do.
The one rule
You may only collect stock onto a document that is Placed.
If it is still Parked, myWork refuses:
Shipment SS-000xxxx can't be collected: it is still Parked — place it first, then collect.
This is the same for a Sales Shipment and a Local Shipment. It is not a glitch and there is no way around it on the floor.
What Parked actually means
Parked is a draft. Somebody has written down what they intend to send, and nothing more has happened.
It reserves no stock. Not one unit is set aside.
Nobody else can see that those goods are spoken for. To the rest of the company, that stock is still free.
It does not appear as a commitment anywhere — not on the Available Stock Check report, not in anyone's availability figure.
So if you were able to collect stock for a Parked shipment, you would be walking off with units that myWork still believes are available. Sales would keep promising them. Another shipment would be placed against them. The shortfall only shows up later, at somebody else's dispatch — and by then the stock is gone.
That is the over-sell, and it is exactly what the block exists to prevent. Availability is a regulation, not a suggestion: the number on the screen has to mean something, and it only does if every claim on stock is registered before the stock moves.
What Placed means
Placing is the act of registering the claim. The moment a shipment goes Parked › Placed:
its quantity becomes Allocated against the product;
everybody else's free-to-move figure drops by that amount;
the floor may collect and then dispatch it;
competing shipments for the same product are correctly blocked instead of quietly stealing your stock.
Placing is also the moment the over-sell check runs. If there is not enough free stock, placing fails then and there — which is the right time to find out, at a desk, rather than in the aisle with a customer waiting.
What Dispatched means
The goods have physically left and the stock has been consumed. Dispatch cannot be undone. The record opens read-only afterwards; the buttons that move stock are switched off.
You can still add photos and attachments to a dispatched record — that is always allowed, and it is often the only way to prove condition after the fact.
Statuses by document type
Not every document uses the same words. These are the ones you will see.
Sales Shipment (SS-…) — Parked › Placed › Dispatched, plus Deleted. Collect and dispatch need Placed. On the floor your Queue toggle shows only Placed (the work to do) and Dispatched (what you finished). A Sales Shipment manager sees the full list, which also carries Open, and the packing states Picking, Picked and Packed for shipments that were asked to be packed. Parked and Deleted never appear on the floor.
Local Shipment (LS-…) — Parked › Placed › Dispatched, plus Deleted. Identical rules to a Sales Shipment. A new manual Local Shipment is born Parked — the operator builds it, then places it.
Local Receipt (LR-…) — Parked › Placed › Complete, plus Deleted. This one is inbound, so Parked is only "draft, not expected yet" — it reserves nothing because nothing is going out. Placed means "we are expecting this to arrive"; Complete means every line has been received. Receipts are born Placed by the consignment agreement or work order that needs them; Parked only happens when someone parks one to edit it.
myWork Purchase Order (MPO-…) — DRAFT › READY › PLACED › RECEIVING › COMPLETE, plus CANCELLED. You receive against a PLACED order. RECEIVING means some but not all of it has arrived.
External Service Order (ESO-…) — Draft › Placed › Partially Dispatched › Dispatched › Partially Returned › Completed, plus Cancelled. Sending material out needs the order Placed and approved. Once it is running, sending and receiving interleave freely — the status just describes how far along it is.
Credit Note return — a credit note is not available on the floor until a sales manager approves the return. Then it appears on your Credit Notes (Returns) queue.
Parking something that is already Placed
Sometimes a Placed shipment has to go back to draft to be corrected. That is Park for editing, and on the floor you will usually not have it.
That is deliberate. Parking a placed shipment means deciding the goods are not going out yet — and the one question that matters, is the customer already on their way in to fetch it?, cannot be answered by software. Only whoever owns the customer relationship knows. So the permission (ShipmentUnplace) sits with Sales, not with the floor. The person who created the document may always un-place their own.
Two things to know if you see it happen:
Parking takes the shipment off your queue entirely. You cannot collect it and you cannot dispatch it until it is placed again.
Once stock has actually been received against a Local Receipt, it can no longer be un-placed at all — those lines are now a record of what physically arrived, and rewriting them would be falsifying the record.
Whose job is it to get it placed?
The person who needs the goods. Not you, and not a message you carry for them.
When somebody asks you to pick a shipment that turns out to be Parked, the whole of your job is to tell them so: "it isn't placed, so there's nothing on it for me to pick." From there it is theirs — they go to Sales and get it placed, and it appears in your queue by itself.
Do not take the request to Sales on their behalf. It feels helpful and it is the opposite:
The person who wants the goods is the one who can answer Sales' questions about them. You cannot.
Once a request passes through a third person, nobody can tell who is waiting on what. It stops being anybody's job.
Every relay adds a delay to a customer who is already waiting.
You can see the shipment's status; so can they. Every record carries its own chat channel — the speech-bubble next to its number — so the conversation about that shipment can happen on that shipment, between the two people who can actually settle it. That is what this system is for. Asking someone with no authority over a decision to pass a message along is the habit it was built to replace.
What to do when you are blocked
"it is still Parked — place it first, then collect." Do not look for a workaround, and do not chase Sales for somebody else. Tell whoever asked you that it is not placed, and leave it with them. If it then cannot be placed, that is because the stock is not actually free — see Why a shipment says "Not enough free stock".
"only a Placed shipment can be collected/staged (status: …)" — the document is Dispatched or Deleted. That job is finished or cancelled; you are on the wrong record.
Nothing happens when you tap Collect — check the chip. A completed record opens read-only on purpose.
In short
Parked = a draft that promises nothing. Collecting is refused, because the stock is not reserved and nobody else knows you have taken it.
Placed = the claim is registered. Only now may you collect and dispatch.
Dispatched = final. Attachments still allowed, nothing else.
Availability only works if everyone respects this. Collecting against a Parked document is not a shortcut — it is an over-sell in the making.
Say it is not placed, and hand it back. Getting a shipment placed belongs to the person who needs it, not to the picker they asked.