Blanket purchase orders

Where

Purchase Transactions → Blanket POs

Plan

Professional and above

Permission

Purchasing → Purchase Order

A blanket purchase order is a standing agreement: you commit to buying, say, 1,200 cases of a drink over the year at a fixed price, and call the stock off in batches as you need it. Each call-off is called a release.

Releases cannot currently be created from the app

The Create release window opens with the date, notes and options — but with no product rows at all, so there is nothing to enter a quantity against. Submitting shows “Enter a quantity for at least one line.”

The screen that opens the window does not load the agreement’s committed products before doing so, and there is no other way in. Until this is fixed, treat blanket POs as a record of the agreement only, and place your actual orders as ordinary purchase orders.

The rest of this page describes how releases are meant to work, and is accurate about what the system does once one exists.

How to set up an agreement

1. Go to Purchase Transactions → Blanket POs.
2. Click New blanket PO.
3. Choose the Location and the Supplier. Both are required.
4. Set Valid from and Valid to — the window in which stock can be called off.
5. Optionally set a Min release amount and Max release amount to control the size of each call-off.
6. Type the agreed Terms.
7. Under Committed products, click Add product for each item, and enter the Total quantity you are committing to and the agreed Unit price.
8. Click Save draft, or Save & activate to make it live.

The total committed value is worked out for you.

Leave the dates in, and understand what blank amounts mean

Valid from and Valid to are optional, and an agreement with no dates never expires.

A blank Min or Max release amount means “no limit”, not zero. Leaving Max blank does not cap anything.

How to make a release

Not currently possible — see the warning above. When it works, the intent is:

1. Find the Active agreement and click Create release in its row menu.
2. Set the Release date and the Requested delivery date.
3. Enter a Release qty against each product. The Remaining figure shows how much of the commitment is left.
4. Tick Create a purchase order for this release if you want the order raised for you.
5. Add Notes and save.

What the system does with a release:

• You cannot over-call-off. Asking for more than remains is refused.
• Min and max release amounts are enforced, when they are set.
• The agreement must be active and within its dates. Outside them you are told it is not yet valid or has expired.
• The remaining quantity and the released total are updated.
• If you asked for one, a draft purchase order is created against the same supplier, at the agreed price.

A release does not order or receive anything

The purchase order it creates is a plain draft. It still has to be sent, may still need approval, and still needs a good receipt when the goods arrive.

The Requested delivery date you set on the release is not carried onto that order — it will show no dates at all. Open it and fill them in.

How to suspend, close or cancel an agreement

All from the row menu:

Suspend	Pauses it. No releases while suspended. Reversible — Activate to resume.
Close	Ends it normally. Permanent.
Cancel	Ends it early, with a reason. Permanent.

Ending an agreement does nothing to what came before

Closing or cancelling does not reverse releases already made, and does not touch any purchase order raised from them. Those orders live on independently — cancel them yourself if you do not want them.

What to watch out for

• “Expired” never happens by itself. There is no automatic expiry and no Expire button, so an agreement past its end date still shows as Active. It simply refuses new releases, telling you it has expired. Watch the Valid to column, not the status.
• Releases are only visible from the row detail view. There is no list of releases.
• Not printable, exportable or sendable — unlike ordinary purchase orders.
• The delete option is offered for cancelled agreements but the server refuses it. You get a confirmation dialog, then an error. Only drafts really delete.
• Editing a draft replaces all its lines.
• No approvals. Unlike purchase orders, blanket agreements are never approval-gated, no matter how large the commitment.
• Needs a connection.

Staff may not be able to see the buttons at all

The New blanket PO, Edit and Delete controls are checked against permission names that do not exist in the system. Because no role can ever hold a permission that is not defined, those three buttons are invisible to every ordinary user.

Only an owner or system administrator, who bypasses permission checks, sees them. If a manager reports that the buttons are missing, they are right and it is not their role setup.

Related

• Purchase orders
• Suppliers