A Purchase Order records what you have ordered from a supplier, at what cost, and when you expect it. From it you receive the goods into stock and enter the supplier’s bill — and because both link back to the order, you can see at any point what was ordered, what actually turned up, and what you were charged for.
Where to find it: Purchase Orders in the Orders section of the main menu.
Purchase Orders are part of the orders and demand planning feature set. If the menu entry is missing, the Orders & Demand Planning account setting is switched off.
The order list
| Column | Notes |
|---|---|
| Order Ref | Generated on save. |
| Supplier | Who you are buying from. |
| Order Date | When the order was raised. |
| Expected Date | When you expect delivery. |
| Status | Draft, Sent, Partial Received, Received, Closed or Cancelled. |
| Source | Whether the order was keyed here or imported from an accounting integration. |
The list is newest first, searchable by order reference and filterable by status.
The order screen
Line types
Three buttons sit beneath the grid, and the one you press decides what kind of line you get. The type governs whether the line can be received into stock, and how it is treated when the bill is built.
| Button | What it adds |
|---|---|
| + Line | A product line — stock you are buying, which can be received against the order. |
| + Charge | Freight, a pallet fee, a surcharge. It appears on the bill but is never received, because nothing physically arrives. |
| + Misc Line | A one-off item that is not a stocked product — a service, a repair, a sundry purchase. |
Charge lines are never receivable. A goods receipt raised from an order picks up its product lines and leaves the charges behind, so freight never appears as something to count off a pallet.
The line grid
| Column | Notes |
|---|---|
| Product | Type to search. The picker is scoped to what that supplier supplies, and to what the line type allows. |
| Description | Defaults from the product; editable per line. |
| Qty / UOM | How much, in which unit. Product and misc lines both require a unit. |
| Expected | A per-line expected date, for orders arriving in more than one delivery. |
| Unit Cost | Filled in from your agreed supplier pricing where one exists, and always overtypeable. |
| Tax | Defaults from the product and supplier; changeable per line. |
| Received | Read-only. How much has actually been received against the line, across every receipt. |
| Amount | Read-only line total. |
Rejected goods do not count as received. If a receipt line is rejected on QA grounds, its quantity is taken back off the order’s received figure and the line stays outstanding — so a rejected delivery leaves the order genuinely waiting for stock, and can be received again when the supplier replaces it.
Status and actions
| Action | Available when | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Send to Supplier | Draft | Marks the order as sent. Once sent you can receive goods and create bills against it, so lines should be finalised first. |
| Create Inwards Good | Any time after Draft, unless cancelled | Raises the goods receipt. May offer to add to a receipt already open for that supplier — see below. |
| Create Bill | Any time after Draft, unless cancelled | Creates a draft bill pre-filled from the order and opens it for editing. |
| Cancel | Draft or Sent, before any goods are received | Cancels the order. It cannot be undone, and it is refused once anything has been received. |
| Close | Late in the order’s life | Marks it complete and locks it: no further goods receipts or bills can be created against it. Use it to retire an order with a small short-delivery you have agreed to write off. |
Create Inwards Good, and the existing-receipt prompt
If a goods receipt is already open for that supplier, the action asks whether to add the order’s lines to it or start a new receipt. Suppliers commonly deliver several orders on one vehicle, and this is where you keep that as one receipt rather than three. Where nothing is open for the supplier, a new receipt is created directly.
Seeing what arrived
The order lists the goods receipts raised against it, so you can go from the order to the delivery that satisfied it. The relationship works both ways and is many-to-many in practice:
- One order can be received over several deliveries — the received quantity accumulates across them, and the order sits in Partial Received until it is complete.
- One receipt can cover several orders from the same supplier, and reports the purchase orders it came from.
- A receipt raised from an order takes its reference from the order by default, so the paperwork matches without retyping.
Currency and tax
- An order is raised in a currency, defaulting to the supplier’s, with the exchange rate recorded on the order so later rate movements do not rewrite its value.
- Each line carries a tax code, defaulted from the product and supplier, and the order shows tax summarised by code.
- When a bill is built from the order, it honours the tax code on each line rather than re-deriving it — so what you agreed to pay is what gets billed.
Things to know
- Receiving and billing are independent. You can bill from the order or from the receipt, and three-way matching compares the two against the bill.
- Lines lock as goods arrive. Once a quantity has been received against a line it stops being freely editable, so the order keeps matching what actually happened.
- Cancelled orders keep their history. Cancelling stops future activity; it does not erase receipts or bills already raised.