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Purchase orders

A purchase order records what you want to buy from a supplier, at what price, and where it should arrive. Orders are numbered PO-1000 onwards by default.

Lifecycle​

An order moves through:

  • Draft — being built.
  • Pending approval — submitted, waiting on someone with approval rights.
  • Approved — signed off, ready to send.
  • Sent — issued.
  • Partially received / Received — goods arriving against it, tracked automatically as receipts post.
  • Closed — a manual end state, used to abandon whatever is left outstanding.

An order is editable only while it is a draft. Submitting it for approval locks it. Rejecting a pending order returns it to draft, which makes it editable again.

Sending does not contact the supplier​

Sending an order does not email or otherwise contact the supplier. It records that you have issued the order and stamps the date it was sent. You send the order to the supplier yourself, by downloading its PDF from the order and passing it on however you normally would.

A receiving site must be set on the order before it can be sent.

Line identity is fixed at the time you add it​

Each order line captures its product identity — SKU, description, and the supplier's own reference — at the moment the line is added. If a variant is later renamed, the order and its PDF keep showing what was true when the line was created, so the paperwork you sent the supplier never silently changes underneath you.

Closing an order versus closing a line short​

These are two different actions:

  • Closing the order abandons whatever quantity is still outstanding on every line. It is done from the order's own page, and is available once the order has been sent.
  • Closing a line short abandons the remaining quantity on a line. It is chosen while receiving against the order, not from the order page itself.

How much closing short affects depends on which receiving screen you are on. Accepting and closing a delivery closes every line on that order that is not yet complete — including lines the delivery never touched — so the order is not left part-received forever. The older per-item choice on an ad-hoc receipt closes only the item you chose it for.

Both take the abandoned quantity out of reordering, and both do it immediately. Closing the whole order removes everything still outstanding on it from the on-order figure. Closing a single line short removes that line's remainder on its own, without waiting for the rest of the order to finish — the order's other lines keep counting as on order until they are received or closed in their turn.