While making changes to products, like adding barcodes for example, you may notice a message at the top of the screen that gives a total number for orders that need to be updated. What does this mean?
Certain changes to a product will change it's status. For example when a product has no barcodes it's status us "new". When the first barcode is added it may change to "active" assuming it has a name and sku as well. When a product changes status it will change the status of orders and kits that contain it.
Since there can be 10's of thousands of orders in the system it's not a good idea to update all affected orders each time a product status changes. Instead we provide an update button so that all changes can be queued and made at once when you're done editing products. So, for example, if you have been adding barcodes to a list of new items you can click update when you are done and the statuses for all affected orders will be changed.