Purchase orders

Where

Purchase Transactions → Purchase Orders

Plan

Growth and above

Permission

Purchasing → Purchase Order

How to raise a purchase order

1. Go to Purchase Transactions → Purchase Orders.
2. Click New order.
3. Choose the Location the goods are coming to.
4. Choose the Supplier.
5. Set the Order date and, if you know it, the Delivery date.
6. Under Products, click Add product and pick your first item. Its unit cost is filled in from the price you normally pay — change it if this order is different.
7. Enter the Quantity. Add a Discount or Tax on the line if they apply.
8. Repeat for every item.
9. Click Save draft if you are not finished, or Save & send to place the order.

The order number (PO-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS-NNNNNN) is created for you. So are all the totals — the figures shown while you type are a preview, and the final amounts are worked out on the server when you save.

How to send an order you saved as a draft

1. Find the order in the list.
2. Open its row menu and click Send.

The status changes from Draft to Pending. If your business uses approvals and this order needs one, it will sit at Pending approval instead until someone decides.

How to record the supplier’s confirmation

When the supplier comes back and confirms what they will actually supply, and when:

1. Find the order and click Confirm in its row menu.
2. The Supplier confirmation window shows each line’s Requested qty and Requested unit cost next to boxes for Promised qty and Promised unit cost.
3. Change anything the supplier has changed, and set the Promised delivery date.
4. Save.

This records what was promised without altering what you originally asked for, so you can see later where a supplier fell short. You can confirm again if they revise their answer.

How to close an order off

• An order completes by itself once you have received every item in full.
• To close one early — the supplier can only part-supply and you do not want the rest — open the row menu and click Complete.

How to cancel an order

1. Open the row menu and click Cancel.
2. Type a Reason if you want one recorded, and confirm.

Cancel fails if anything has already been received

If even one good receipt exists against the order, the cancel is refused with a message telling you to cancel those receipts first. Frustratingly, you only find this out after you have typed the reason — the button does not know in advance.

Cancelling cannot be undone.

How to delete an order

Only a draft can be deleted. Open the row menu, click Delete and confirm. The record is hidden rather than erased, so your numbering stays intact.

What raising a purchase order does — and does not do

Stock	Nothing. No stock moves, and the order does not show as incoming.
Accounts	Nothing. No entry is posted anywhere.
The supplier	Nothing automatic. Sending marks the order as sent; use Print or Send to actually get it to them.

Everything real happens at the good receipt.

Approvals

If your business has approvals switched on for purchase orders, the gate fires at one moment only: when you send a draft. No other action is checked.

Whether it fires depends on how your business has set it up — it can be off entirely, on for every order, or on only above a value you choose. Orders below the auto-approve floor are never gated. Approvals for purchase orders need the Growth plan; below that, orders always send straight through.

Rejecting an order cancels it permanently

If an approver rejects a purchase order it is not sent back for editing — it is cancelled outright, with the reason “rejected in approval workflow”. Cancelled is final. The order cannot be fixed and resubmitted; somebody has to create a new one.

What to watch out for

• A sent order can never be edited. There is no amend or revise. Cancel it and raise a new one.
• Editing a draft replaces all of its lines. Any link to an individual line is lost.
• Two statuses you will see in the filter can never actually happen — Awaiting confirmation and In progress are legal in the system but nothing in the app can set them. Filtering by either always returns nothing.
• The supplier box can be left empty if your business has switched off the setting that requires one. The server never insists on a supplier.
• A very large discount can produce a negative line total. The on-screen preview stops at zero but the saved figure does not, so the amount you end up with can differ from what you saw.
• Old drafts can go read-only on their own. A setting called Stock Posting Open Days — an inventory setting — also governs how far back a purchase order stays editable. If someone sets it low, old drafts freeze.

Related

• Receiving goods — where the stock and money actually move
• Blanket purchase orders — standing agreements
• Approvals