Purchases

Creating a Purchase Order

Every field on the purchase order form, what is required, and what a saved PO does and does not do.

A purchase order is a formal commitment to buy. It is the only purchase document with no financial impact at all — no journal, no payable, no stock movement. Its job is to state what you agreed to buy, at what price, so that everything downstream can be measured against it.

Navigate to: Procurement → Purchase Orders → New

The purchase order form. Vendor and date are the only required header fields — a PO carries no payment terms and no due date.

Required Fields

The form enforces exactly three things: a vendor, a date, and at least one valid line item. A line is valid when it names an item, carries a quantity above zero, and carries a rate of zero or more.

Field	Required?	Details
Vendor	Yes	Searchable select. The vendor you are ordering from.
Date	Yes	The order date. A PO has no accounting period consequence — this date is the commitment date.
Items	Yes	At least one line with an item, a quantity above zero and a rate.
Center/Location	Conditional	Shown as a header field, and required when center filtering is enabled for your business.

✅No payment terms, no due date

Unlike a bill, a purchase order carries neither. Nothing is owed yet, so there is nothing to age. Terms and a due date are set on the bill that the order eventually becomes.

The Items Table

The order lines. The rate you agree here is the figure every later comparison is measured against.

Columns are Item, Qty, Rate, Discount, Tax and Amount — the same table a bill uses. The item's purchase account, rate and tax rate populate from the item record, and a description can be expanded per line.

The rate matters more here than anywhere else in the cycle. It is the agreed price, and it is the number the Lifecycle panel compares the billed rate against. A purchase order raised with a placeholder rate produces variance warnings later that mean nothing.

Optional Fields

Added from the Fields menu as pills: Subject, Center/Location, Project, PO Number, Tags, Note, Attachments.

PO Number here is your own internal reference — a requisition number, a contract reference. It is not what links this order to the bill; converting is.

Saving

Button	What it does
Save	Saves with a permanent number (e.g. PO000118) and the status Open. No journal, no payable, no stock. The menu beside it also offers Save & Print, Save & Duplicate and Save & New.
Save as Draft	Saves with a draft number (D-PO000118). Fully editable, and not yet counted as an open commitment.

After Saving

The detail page carries the document number and status badge, the ordered lines and totals, the Convert to action, and a Lifecycle panel that will fill in as goods arrive and bills are raised.

Send the order to the vendor with More → Share — email with a copy of the PDF, or a copy-able link.

A saved purchase order can still be corrected while it is Open or Partly fulfilled: More → Update voids it and creates a replacement with a new number.

Turning the commitment into a receipt or a cost: Converting a purchase order.
Statuses, and the full detail page: Purchase orders.
Where the order sits in the wider flow: Purchase cycles.
Sending it to the vendor: Sharing a purchase document.