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A purchase order records stock you have ordered from a supplier. Until it arrives it counts as Incoming in Inventory; once you receive it, it becomes On hand. Purchase orders sit on their own tab beside Inventory.

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Creating one

New purchase order appears on both the Inventory and Purchase orders tabs. Fill in the details, then use Add items, then Create purchase order. Every one of those is optional. What a purchase order cannot be created without is at least one item with a quantity. Unit cost is optional too: you place the order on the supplier’s own site, so the cost here is for your records. Adding items from an order fills it in from the blank’s piece price where it can. A blank or $0.00 cost prints as a dash on the PDF, and so does the total when every cost is blank.
The New purchase order form, with the Details panel on the left and the Items panel on the right

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Adding items

The Add items dialog has three tabs. Needs purchasing lists exactly what your open orders are short of, and you can search it by item name, order number or customer, or narrow it to one store or supplier. This is the fast path: Itemstores has already worked out what you need to buy. Items there are grouped by product with a row per size and its count. Expand a size to see which orders are waiting on it, and tick a whole product to take every size at once. The button names the total you are adding. Quantities are already netted against what is on open purchase orders, so a shortfall another purchase order covers is not offered again. From work order fills the form with everything on one work order, split by supplier, one tab each. Work orders are listed newest first, and you can search them by title, order number or customer. Selecting one replaces anything already in the form. All items is your whole product list, for stock you want on the shelf regardless of current orders. It works differently: select a product, pick its variants, set the Quantity, then Add to purchase order. A product with sizes takes a quantity per size.
The Add items dialog on the Needs purchasing tab, with store and supplier filters and items grouped by product

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Marking it purchased

Once you place the order with the supplier, select Mark purchased on the Items panel. If the supplier backorders it, choose Mark backordered from the ⋮ menu, and Mark purchased again once they confirm. Backordered covers whatever has not arrived, so a partly received purchase order can be marked backordered too. Neither can be moved back to Pending.

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Receiving stock

Open the purchase order and enter what actually arrived in the Received column, per line. It saves as soon as you leave the field, on its own, without the form’s Save changes. A line’s received quantity can be anything from zero up to what you ordered, which is how a partly delivered order is recorded. Mark received on the Items panel receives every remaining item in one go. Select a line to see which orders are waiting on it and how many each gets.
A purchase order line expanded to show the orders waiting on it and the quantity for each
Received stock stops counting as Incoming in Inventory. It is allocated to the oldest orders still waiting on it first, so it lands under Committed before it shows as Available. Receiving is reversible. Lower the Received number and the stock comes back out, the incoming quantity reopens, and the purchase order’s status steps back.
When some of what you are receiving belongs to orders that already shipped without pulling stock, you are asked whether to Receive as already-used or Add to stock. Already-used books the receipt and nets those units straight back out, so they do not become inventory you do not have.
A pending purchase order with Mark purchased and Mark received on its Items panel, and the Quantity and Received columns side by side
On a saved purchase order the Items panel’s ⋮ menu holds Add items, so you can keep adding to one after it exists.

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Cancelling one

Cancel sits in that same ⋮ menu.
Cancelling is permanent. It removes anything already received from inventory, including stock committed to orders, and the orders that were counting on this purchase order go back to needing purchasing.
A cancelled purchase order can no longer be edited or received, and it drops out of the All, Open and Late filters.

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Printing

Print on the Items panel downloads the purchase order as a PDF, for sending to a supplier or filing.

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Acting on several at once

Select rows in the list and a toolbar appears with Mark received and Cancel, which run across the whole selection. Cancel there carries the same consequences as cancelling one. You can also start a purchase order from a selection of orders rather than purchase orders: select orders on the Orders list and choose New purchase order from its toolbar (up to 100 at a time). It opens New purchase order with those orders’ short items already added.
A purchase order holds one supplier. If the selected orders span more than one, New purchase order opens with one tab per supplier, each its own purchase order, and Create makes all of them at once. Adding items from another supplier on any tab puts them on that supplier’s tab, or opens a new one.
Items already in stock or already on another open purchase order are added anyway, at their full ordered quantity, and flagged as an over-buy. Check the badge before you submit.

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The list

Cards across the top show Needs purchasing, Open POs, POs received and Total cost for the window set by Show stats for. Filter with All, Open, Late or Cancelled. Each row shows its date, PO number, supplier, item quantity, total cost, status, expected date and tracking. An expected date that has passed on an open purchase order turns red, and Late filters to those. The status is Pending, Purchased, Backordered, Partially received, Received or Cancelled. Open means anything not yet fully received or cancelled.