Purchase Orders (POs) are formal documents created with your suppliers indicating the types, quantities, and agreed prices for products or services the supplier will provide your business. The following article details how to create new POs, add products and additional costs to them and tips to help you effectively manage your purchasing process.

The prices and costs included on your Purchase Orders will contribute to the Average Landed Costs (ALC) of your receipted goods, which impact your sales, profits and margins.

To create a Purchase Order and subsequently receipt stock into your inventory, you first need to ensure you have the following already setup:

Maintain control of your purchasing process by determining which users have the authority to create, approve, cost, receipt and complete POs, using the following role permissions:

Depending upon your procurement process, POs can be created either from scratch (as detailed below), by cloning an existing PO or creating them directly from Sales Orders, Assemblies, or the Reorder Report. Whilst each initial PO creating process will slightly differ, once a PO has been created it's progression from Parked status to Complete is the same.

To create a new, blank Purchase Order:

Once a supplier's been selected in the new PO, the PO will be given an auto-generated Purchase Order Number and Parked status. From here, you can add the products you need to purchase and any applicable freight, labor or further additional costs applicable to this purchase.

​Whilst a PO's in Parked, Placed, Costed or a custom PO status products can be added as Order Lines to establish the stock you'd like to buy. Once added, the Order Lines can be updated as necessary until it's receipted.

To add each Order Line to a PO:

Once an Order Line's been added to a PO, the following fields and functions will become available to help you edit or add further context and detail to your PO:

You can also update each Order Line's Order Quantity, Price (per unit) and Disc. Price as and when needed, before receipting.

All Delivery Dates for Order Lines will initially be populated with the header's Delivery Date. However, if you know you'll be receiving your PO in parts, allocate a Delivery Date per Order Line. This will provide your business with a more accurate understanding of your expected deliveries, and help plan for your subsequent production and selling needs.

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If you've incurred further charges as a result of placing your Purchase Order, such as; freight costs, labor, storage etc. add them into the Cost Lines of the PO. If you have no additional costs to allocate to the PO, leave the Cost Lines section blank.

Costs can be added to a Purchase Order from any supplier, at any time prior to completing the PO. This means you can manage a single PO with multiple supplier costs, in various currencies. If the costs are added after the Purchase Order has been receipted, the additional costs will be applied to the receipted goods as a "recost".

To add each supplier's Cost Line to an open or receipted PO:

When costs have been added to a PO it's base currency value will be distributed amongst the products on your Order Lines using the distribution methods advised. The value that's proportioned per Order Line will be shown in the Costing Total per Order Line.

​You can manually amend how the costs have been automatically distributed by selecting each Order Line's Costing Total field. If you are manually amending theses costs, you will need to ensure their sum total still equals your Cost Lines total, in your base currency. If they do not match, an orange exclamation point icon will show, warning that the costs don't match and will need to be corrected. Click the orange icon to redistribute the costs using the provided distribution methods.
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Once all known products and costs have been added to the Purchase Order select the green Place button in the top right corner of the PO; this confirms it and update your reports with the incoming stock. If you've not yet finished adding products or costs and the PO is still being drafted, select the Save button's Park status option.
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Whilst in Placed status, you can still add, remove or edit the existing Order and Cost Lines. You can also allocate custom Purchase Order statuses to help keep track of your Placed POs.

When the PO's stock is being delivered update the PO and your stock on hand accordingly by receipting it. See Receipt a Purchase Order.

Upload external documentation or files to your PO using the Attachment tab. The attachments saved on the PO will then be stored for reference and available to attach to any emails created from your PO.

Below the PO's header fields, select the Attachments tab and from here you can select either "browse local files" to upload from your device, or "search uploaded files" to attach from your existing File Library.

The "Require Approval for Purchase Orders" setting in your Company settings allows you to establish an approval process for when your team create new Purchase Orders. This gives you tighter control over how much you're spending on new stock and ensures your team are following the due process.

The "Require Approval for Purchase Orders" setting can be enabled or disabled at any time, by any user with "Company" permission enabled. From the main menu, go to Settings > Company > Configuration and use the available toggle to turn the approval requirement setting on or off; making sure to click Save once you've finished making the update.

When enabled, you can decide whether approval's required for all Purchase Orders or only those that exceed a certain price limit, using the open "Approval required for Purchase Orders totaling over {base currency}" field. To require approval for all PO's enter "0.00" as the limit, otherwise enter a positive value as the limit and PO's created by users that don't have approval permission will require approval for POs they create over that value, not including PO Costs.

When the "Require Approval for Purchase Orders" setting is enabled, you can then decide which of your users have approval privileges for Purchase Orders by granting or restricting the "Purchase Order Approval" permission in their user's role.

To manage a user's role permissions, go to the main menu and select Settings > Security > Role Permissions. Use the Role drop down menu to select the role being updated, find the "Purchase Order Approval" permission under "Purchases" and use the padlock icon to either grant or restrict access.

When a user's role restricts them from approving a Purchase Order, they will have the option to create and update existing Purchase Orders, but the Purchase Order will be given an Unapproved status. A user with approval permission granted will then be required to approve the PO, and the restricted user can then proceed with progressing the PO to Placed status.

The below steps outline an example of how the Purchase Order approval process will flow:

In some cases you'll be required to make a deposit or pre-payment to suppliers for your POs, prior to receipting them. Purchase Orders in Unleashed cannot separate the price and distributed costs of it's stock from it's receipting into your inventory and as such, it's not possible to manage a deposit or pre-payment for a PO directly in Unleashed. We recommend noting any payments made to a supplier prior to receipting in the PO's Comments field. For example, you can add a comment "50% deposit paid on this {date}, Receipt Number: 12345", so that when the POs later receipted and exported to your accounting provider, the comment can be used to reconcile the payment with the PO's Bill to Pay.

For further visibility and clarification with your supplier, you can choose to include PO Comments in your Doc Designer's Purchase Order templates, by adding the "Comments" component from Toolbox > Other Data.