Purchase orders
Before you start, open this page: Purchases / Purchase orders.
Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.
A purchase order is your promise to buy.
It is the document your supplier works from, and the one your receipt and your bill get checked against later.
What it holds
- A purchase order number.
- The supplier, and the supplier quote it came from, where there was one.
- Currency, order date and expected delivery date.
- Business location, which is where the goods are going.
- Lines, a description, and any documents.
There is also a sales order link, for when you are buying something specifically to fulfil an order you have already taken.
That link is what connects a customer who is waiting to the delivery they are waiting for.
It marks stock as on its way
The moment a purchase order exists, its quantities show as on its way at the place they are going to.
This is the planning number from the inventory course.
It does not mean you have the goods. It means somebody has promised them.
That is enough to stop a colleague ordering the same thing again on Thursday. It is not enough to promise a customer Friday delivery.
The “on its way” number comes down when the goods actually arrive.
The expected delivery date is a working field
It is not decoration, and it is not the supplier’s sales talk.
It is what makes “what is late?” a question with an answer.
So put in the date you were actually promised, and update it when it changes.
A list of purchase orders where every date is optimistic is a list nobody checks. And then lateness gets discovered by a customer instead of by you.
The location is the destination
Which location receives the goods decides where the “on its way” number sits, and where the stock will land.
Get it wrong and goods arrive somewhere that was not expecting them, while the place that was expecting them waits for an arrival that never comes.
Same trap as everywhere else in FeePrime. Quantities belong to places.
Order from the quote you accepted
Where you have a supplier quote, raise the order from it.
The lines and prices carry across, the link is kept, and any later argument about what was agreed has a document behind it.
Type a fresh order instead and you break that chain. The price you meant to hold the supplier to is now just a number you typed in.
Try it
On staging.feeprime.com, raise a purchase order from a supplier quote, then check the “on its way” number on one of its items.
Then change the expected delivery date, and notice that this is a live document, not a filed one.