Purchase Orders (POs) allow you to manage your inventory by placing orders under Vendors, receiving inventory, and reconciling your purchases against your accounting software. It's a little more complex than our other inventory management options.
Please watch our video series on purchase orders if you have any questions that this guide doesn't answer.
Note: In order to use Purchase Orders, you must set up a Bill of Material for all of your products, so that they each have a sales unit, inventory unit, and purchase unit. See our video series on setting up products for more information. If your sales unit and your purchase unit are the same (e.g. you sell the same item your purchase), you can also set up a 1:1 product / simple BOM.
Creating Purchase Orders
- Go to Purchasing > Purchase Orders > View Vendors.
- Search for a vendor. You can filter your search by vendor contact first name and last name, vendor name, vendor ID, ZIP or postal code, email address, or phone number. If you would like to search for all vendors, just leave all of these fields blank.
- Find the vendor who is carrying the product you would like to order. You must have Vendors set up and assigned to your purchase units before you can create a Purchase Order. (If you purchase the same item from multiple vendors, you would need to create multiple purchase units and link them to a single inventory unit.)
- Click the Order button next to that vendor.
- You'll be redirected to a PO orderpad that is very similar to the one you use to place regular orders. Select a product category to bring up a list of products to order.
- If you don't see at least product category (e.g. default), it means that this vendor has not been assigned to any purchase units.
- Enter a quantity for each product you would like to order.
- Click the Add button.
- Turn your attention to the three order tabs: Items, Shipping, and Notes.
- On the Items Tab, once you have added a product, you can apply a discount, edit a shipping charge, or remove an item.
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Discount - Click the green $ sign next to a line item to apply a discount.
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Edit Shipping Charge - Click the Edit button next to 'delivery' to manually edit your shipping charge.
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Remove Item - Click on the trashcan to remove an item that you have added.
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- On the Shipping Tab, you fill out shipping info. Don't forget to click Save Shipping Details once you're done!
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Distribution Centre - Select a distribution centre (DC) from the dropdown menu. Note that the DC you select here will determine which warehouse the On Order inventory will appear under on reports such as the Stock Status Component.
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Shipping Method - Click the circle next to the shipping method you would like to use for this PO.
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Ship Date - The date when the PO should ship. Click the calendar icon (
) to select a date. -
Receive Date - The date when this PO was received. Leave this field blank when you first create a PO. This field is for when you edit a PO after it has been received.
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Arrival Date - The estimated arrival date. This will show on some reports for managing inventory.
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Recipient Name - This pulls from your Distribution centre info under Prefs > System Setup > Shipping and Tax Settings. The same is true for Company Name, Address, Apt No./Suite No., Country, State/Province, City, ZIP/Postal Code, and phone number.
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Purchase Order - This field is to assign a PO # used in any other system.
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Order Notes - For shipping directions. These will show on your Purchase Order Invoice.
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- On the Notes Tab, you can add an additional special note. Like the Order note, this will show on your purchase order invoice. It will also show on the Purchase Order detail page.
- When you've finished adding all products and information to your purchase order, don't forget to click the Submit Order button. You'll be redirected automatically to the PO Detail page.
View Purchase Orders
To view your Purchase Orders after you've created them, go to Purchasing > Purchase Orders > View Purchase Order.
Select your filters and click Submit.
These are the search filters you can use on this page:
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Date Range - Click the calendar icon () next to the empty date range fields to bring up a calendar where you can pick a date.
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Order Date, Ship Date, and Receive Date - By default, any date range you search on this page will be the order date, which is the day when the PO was originally created. You can also filter by the shipdateor receive date instead.
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Display Products - Tick this box to display the Product (Sales Unit) name and SKU instead if the Purchase Unit name and SKU.
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PO Status - Tick the boxes next to the statuses On Order, Received, Reconciled, or Deleted in order to search for only POs with that status.
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Order ID - The ID assigned to a specific purchase order that you are searching for.
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First Name - The first name of the contact assigned to a vendor.
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Last Name - The last name of the contact assigned to a vendor.
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Account Name - The name of the vendor.
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Category - Use this dropdown menu to limit your search to a specific product category.
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Product Content - Search for POs containing a specific product name.
Once you've performed your search, you'll see a list of purchase orders. Click on the Order ID link to view a more detailed page on a specific purchase order.
On the PO detail page, you can email your purchase order invoice to your vendor, edit your purchase order, or click 'View PO' to preview and print your purchase order invoice.
