What cause Items to not be fulfilled, committed, or backordered?

We have set our commitment preference to never commit, because we want all of our quantities ordered to be reflected as on backorder so that we can reliably know the quantity that has been ordered for each location (allocating goods for fulfillment is a very manual process). Having set it up this way I am expecting the backorder column on every order to show the quantity that hasn't been fulfilled yet (unless the line is closed), but in many cases there is no backordered quantity and the fulfilled quantity is zero. I checked to be sure "Do Not