How to write a purchase order

Store › Purchase orders holds the order book, and a new order is created from any of its three views. This page covers the order itself; putting products on it is How to add products and choose your columns.

Before you start

Creating and editing orders needs the purchase order update permission, which is a separate dial from general store write access. Without it the controls are absent rather than greyed.

It also helps to know what you are ordering first. That decision belongs on the stock screen, per How to find out what you need to reorder.

How do you create one?

New PO from the List, the Board or the calendar. The form asks for:

• Vendor, from a searchable list of your suppliers. Arrow keys and Enter work, and typing a name it does not recognise offers to create that supplier without leaving the form.
• PO number, which is your own reference and how you will find the order later.
• Revision state, revise-by date, ship date, expected arrival and days out.
• Original amount and revised amount.

From the form you can jump to that vendor's products, to the vendor profile, or to the full order page.

What are the dates for?

Ship date is when it leaves. Expected arrival is when you get it, and it is what lateness is judged against.

Revise-by is the date you have to confirm or change the order with the supplier. Set a ship date and it fills itself in from the vendor's revision window, and the form tells you what it did and why.

If it does not fill itself in, no revision window is recorded for that vendor. Clicking the vendor's name on the order opens their profile where you can set one, along with a lead time, a rep name, a primary email and payment terms.

Days out is how far ahead of shipping the revision is due, filled from the vendor's profile when one exists.

Why does the revise-by date matter so much?

Because it is the last day you can change your mind at no cost.

Miss it and you take the order as written, whatever the stock screen has learned since. The calendar view exists specifically to make those dates visible a month ahead, covered in How to find late orders and plan revisions.

Orders marked ASAP skip the revision window entirely. Those are placed by picking a revise-by month instead.

What do original and revised amount mean?

Original is the value first agreed. Revised is the value after the supplier confirms. The order book shows the revised amount when there is one.

Keeping both is what lets you see how much a book moved between placing and confirming, which is a number worth knowing before you commit cash.

What currency is the order in?

The supplier's, copied onto the order at the moment it is created. When the vendor is not a supplier record yet, it takes your workspace's home currency.

It is never re-resolved afterwards. Changing a supplier's currency today does not re-price an order from last year, which is why the order book totals per currency and never adds them together.

What happens after you save?

The order starts in your workspace's first not-started stage, and it needs no approval unless you turn that on for it specifically. See How to move a purchase order through its stages and How to route a purchase order for approval.

Open the full order page to add products, work the receiving, and set its properties.

How do you assign an owner or follow one?

On the order's Properties panel. Owner can be a person, a team, or both, and it records who is accountable without granting any extra permission.

Follow is a personal flag that tells you when somebody comments on the order. It covers comments only, so a stage move or a received shipment does not notify followers.

How do you delete one?

From the edit form, with a confirmation.

An order that has received shipments cannot be deleted, and the message explains why: its receipts record real stock changes. Close it short instead, per How to receive a delivery.

Why did changing the vendor name re-link the order?

Because typing a vendor name is how an order finds its supplier. Changing it re-links.

Leaving it alone never re-links, which is the important half: renaming or archiving a supplier elsewhere cannot silently break an existing order's link.