Skip to main content
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.

​
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, each with a quantity and a Unit cost above $0.00. Adding items from an order fills the unit cost in from the blank’s piece price where it can, and leaves it blank where it cannot.
The New purchase order form, with the Details panel on the left and the Items panel on the right

​
Adding items

The Add items dialog has two 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. 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. 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 first item you add locks the dialog to that item’s supplier. Everything after it is filtered to the same one, and the Supplier field fills itself in to match if it was empty.
The Add items dialog on the Needs purchasing tab, with items grouped by product and a row per size

​
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. 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 purchase order's Items panel with 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.

​
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.

​
Printing

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

​
Acting on several at once

There is no standing bulk button. 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.

​
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, Partially received, Received or Cancelled. Open means Pending or Partially received.