What are suppliers and purchase orders?

Suppliers are the companies you pay. Purchase orders are what you have on order with them, from writing one to booking it in.

A supplier is a company you buy from, with contact details, terms and a currency. A purchase order is one order placed with one of them.

Between them they answer the questions a brand lives on: what is on order, when is it arriving, has it arrived, and does this supplier actually deliver when they say they will.

Both live under Store in the sidebar, as Suppliers, Purchase orders and Approvals.

Why keep this in Tideswell rather than a spreadsheet?

Because a purchase order spreadsheet cannot tell you what it means.

Fairgreen Golf Co. ran theirs in a sheet for two years, and it knew an order existed.

It could not say that the merino was down to eleven days of cover while the order covering it was three weeks late, or that this mill has been late on six of its last ten deliveries.

Here those connections are ordinary. An order's units count as incoming on the stock screen, so the reorder suggestion knows about them.

A supplier's lead time drives how urgently their products get flagged, and deliveries score that supplier's on-time record as they arrive.

That last one changes conversations. "You are usually about nine days late" is a different negotiation from "this feels slow".

What is the shape of the work?

Roughly in order:

Add the supplier and record their terms, so the maths elsewhere is right. See How to add a supplier and record their terms.
Write the order and put products on it. See How to write a purchase order.
Move it through your stages, with approval if the order warrants it. See How to move a purchase order through its stages.
Send the revision to the supplier and record what they confirm.
Receive it when it arrives, which is what updates your Shopify stock. See How to receive a delivery.

What decides what to order in the first place?

The stock screen, not this one. Store › Inventory ranks what is running out and suggests quantities, and it is where a purchase order should start.

See How to find out what you need to reorder.

Two things worth understanding early

A supplier and a vendor profile are two different records. The supplier is the company you pay, with the full contact and terms record. A vendor profile is keyed on the vendor name typed on an order and holds the revision window and lead time. Both exist, and they are edited in different places.

Currency is copied onto an order when it is created, and never re-resolved. That is deliberate: changing a supplier's currency today does not re-price orders you placed last year. Totals across the book are shown per currency and never added together.

What has to be switched on?

The Store module, plus Suppliers and Purchase orders, which are separate switches in How to switch parts of Tideswell on and off.

With one of them off, its pages are unreachable rather than merely hidden, so a bookmark stops working too. Viewing suppliers, viewing purchase orders and approving orders are each their own permission.

Read this section in order

How to add a supplier and record their terms first, because the terms recorded there drive dates and quantities everywhere else. Then How to write a purchase order and How to add products and choose your columns are the order itself.

How to receive a delivery is the one to read carefully before you use it, as it writes to your live Shopify stock.