Meaning & use
order bank
Last updated
Meanings
nouncountablebusiness
A store of customer orders that a company has received but not yet completed or delivered.
Grammar: Countable: you can say 'a healthy order bank' or 'order banks grew' with a plural.
Patterns
- a large order bank
- build up an order bank
- the order bank fell
The factory has a full order bank stretching into next spring.
After the trade fair, the company's order bank doubled in a month.
Managers watch the order bank closely to plan hiring.
nouncountablefinancetechnical
A list of buy or sell orders waiting to be matched in a trading system.
Grammar: Often used with 'the' when referring to one particular trading system's queue.
Patterns
- the order bank for a stock
- orders in the order bank
- clear the order bank
Large sell orders sat in the order bank before the market opened.
The exchange publishes the size of its order bank each evening.
Word forms
| plural | order banks |
|---|
Common combinations
- a strong order bank
- A strong order bank gave investors confidence in the firm.
- order bank growth
- Order bank growth slowed in the second quarter.
- build an order bank
- The sales team worked hard to build an order bank for the new model.
- dwindling order bank
- With a dwindling order bank, the plant cut shifts.
- order book
- Analysts compared the order bank with the published order book.
Synonyms and how they differ
- order book
- Very close in meaning and more common in British business writing; 'order bank' often suggests a bigger backlog of work.
- backlog
- Focuses on work that is late or piled up, whereas an order bank is simply orders waiting to be handled.
- pipeline
- Used for sales prospects expected in the future, while an order bank usually means orders already placed.
Word family
Commonly confused: order bank or order book?
order bank vs order book
In finance an order book is the detailed record of live buy and sell orders; an order bank is more often a company's pile of unfilled customer orders.
Practice
The manufacturer hired extra staff because its ___ was larger than ever.
Choose one answer.
'Order bank' is the fixed noun phrase for a store of orders; 'order ban' and 'order band' are not real terms, and 'ordered bank' wrongly uses a past-tense verb before a noun.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “order bank”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.