Purchase Orders

A purchase order (PO) is a legally binding document that a buyer uses to request goods or services from a supplier. It serves as an official offer to purchase specific items at a specified price and is typically used by businesses in the procurement process. The PO includes details such as the type, quantity, and cost of the products or services being requested, as well as any relevant delivery or payment terms.

Once a supplier accepts the PO, it becomes a binding contract between the buyer and seller.

Creating a Purchase Order

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Creating a purchase order has a similar work flow as when creating an invoice. Prior to creating a Purchase Order a Vendor needs to be present in the system. A Vendor can be created directly from the Purchase Order page, or via the Vendor tab.

Details

The Details panel includes the most basic information about the purchase order:

The Purchase order can be decorated with additional terms in the Terms section.

Items

Here you see a list of the line items included on the purchase order. You can add Products, to the purchase order to bill your vendor for. Each item on the list will have these fields available:

Notes

All under one panel in the mobile layout, these options each have their own tabs at the bottom of the purchase order screen when in desktop layout:

Documents

Upload pictures or documents to your purchase ordser, to include for your vendor. These can be attached in the email that is sent to the Vendor.

Lifecycle of a purchase order

Draft

The Draft status is the first status in the lifecycle of a purchase order. In this status, changes can be made to the purchase order and the purchase order is hidden completely from the vendor. Draft purchase orders are inactive until either emailed to the vendor or marked as sent.

Once a draft purchase order has been emailed/marked as sent its status cannot be changed back to draft.

Sent

A purchase order is marked as sent when it has been emailed to the vendor or marked as sent in the admin panel.

Accepted

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When a purchase order is accepted by the vendor the status of the purchase order changes to accepted. The vendor is able to perform this via the Vendor Portal. The vendor can also be asked to agree to additional terms and place a signature on file for this purchase order during the acceptance process.

Received

When the goods have been received, the administrator is able to mark the purchase order as accepted. At this point, if Inventory Tracking is enabled, the stock levels of the products/SKUs are incremented.

Cancelled

If the purchase order is cancelled, it is placed in a cancelled state.

Deleted

A purchase order can be marked as deleted if the following conditions have been met

What happens when a purchase order is deleted?

Archived

Archiving a purchase order simply removes the purchase order from the purchase order list view. Archiving a purchase order keeps your list views clean and tidy.

When a purchase order is archived no further modifications can be made to the purchase order. To modify the purchase order you will need to Restore the purchase order first.

Restored

Restoring a purchase order from the archived or deleted state will set the purchase order back to its previous state prior to archiving.

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