Creating and approving a purchase order

A purchase order goes through three states: Draft, Pending and Approved. You create it as a Draft, submit it for approval, and someone with approval rights approves it. Each step is a separate action, and its button sits in the coloured banner at the top of the order.

Create a purchase order

1. Open Purchase Orders in the top menu.
2. Select Create New PO. You can also start an order from a supplier's page with New Order, or from the Reorder List.
3. Choose the Supplier. Its currency, Payment Term and Incoterm fill in for you, and you can change them.
4. Check the PO Date, which cannot be later than today.
5. Choose a Ship To Warehouse.
6. Check the Currency.
7. If the order is not in your organisation's currency, enter the real Conversion Rate. It starts at 1, and a rate of 1 would value the stock at the foreign amount. The line under the box reads 1 [your currency] = [rate] [order currency].
8. Fill in Expected Delivery, Supplier Reference, Notes and Shipping Cost if you need them.
9. Under Products, select Add product for each line. Each line needs one of this supplier's products, a quantity above zero, a price of zero or more and a tax.
10. Select Save.

Save stays unavailable until the supplier, PO Date, Ship To Warehouse, a valid currency and at least one complete product line are filled in. It also stays unavailable while the PO Date is in the future, Expected Delivery is earlier than the PO Date, a price is negative, or the conversion rate or shipping cost is not a valid number. Ship To Warehouse stays required when you edit the order later.

You cannot save an order whose PO Date falls in a year that has been locked.

Orders in a currency other than your organisation's are included in the Starter plan and above. On the Free plan, the Currency field is fixed to your organisation's currency and shows a padlock.

Creating, editing and submitting orders needs the Create / Edit / Delete Purchase Orders permission. Without it, Create New PO is not in the menu and New Order is not on the supplier's page.

Submit an order for approval

A new order is a Draft. Nothing is expected of it until you submit it.

1. Open the purchase order.
2. In the blue Draft banner at the top, select Request Approval. If you are allowed to approve the order yourself, the same button reads Go to Approval.
3. Confirm in the dialog. If you submit a draft somebody else created, the dialog names its creator and asks you to confirm. The order moves to Pending.

The button is disabled while you are editing the order, so save your changes first. It is not shown without the Create / Edit / Delete Purchase Orders permission, when the order's year is locked, or when the supplier has been deleted.

Submitting notifies the approvers, unless you could approve the order yourself. If a default approver is set for the department or the organisation, only that person is told. If none is set, everyone who could approve the order and can see it is told, never the person who submitted it.

Approve an order

Approving is what commits the order.

1. Open the purchase order. It has to be Pending: a Draft cannot be approved directly.
2. In the amber Pending banner, select Approve.
3. Confirm in the Approve Purchase Order dialog.

Owners can approve any order. Everyone else needs Approve Purchase Orders, which covers any order, or Approve Own Purchase Orders, which covers only orders you created yourself. Without either, the Approve button does not appear. If your account is limited to certain departments, you can only approve orders you are able to see.

The Approve button also disappears while the order is being edited, and the banner then says that saving will reset the order to Draft. It is hidden as well when the supplier has been deleted or the order's year is locked.

When an order changes before approval

If someone changes the order between the moment your screen loaded it and the moment you press Approve, the approval is refused. You see a message saying the purchase order was modified since you loaded it, and the page reloads with the current version. Read the order again, then approve it.

Setting the expected delivery date from the Payment Forecast report counts as such a change. It leaves the order Pending, but it is recorded in the order's history, so an approval from a screen loaded before it is refused in the same way.

The check compares against the last recorded change on the order, so any logged edit counts: products, totals, dates, notes, shipping cost or conversion rate. This is a safeguard on money: approval fixes the amount your organisation is committing to, so it cannot be granted against figures that have already been replaced.

What happens after approval

Once approved, the order records who approved it and when. The green Approved banner shows both; on a phone, it shows the status only.

Approval also starts the handover. The person who asked for the approval is notified, or the person who created the order if nobody asked, unless that is you. If a default shipping assignee is set and the order has no shipment record yet, one is created, assigned to them, and they are notified. If a default payment assignee is set, they are notified that the order is approved and needs payment.

Each notification follows the recipient's own notification settings, and a notification that fails does not undo the approval.

Reopen an approved order

An approved order can no longer be edited. To change it, select Reopen in the Approved banner. This puts it back to Draft, and it then has to be approved again.

Reopen needs the Create / Edit / Delete Purchase Orders permission and is hidden without it, and also when the year is locked or the supplier has been deleted.

The Not Approved state

The order screen also has a Not Approved state, shown as a red banner. Requesting approval and approving, as described here, never put an order into it.