Introduce custom Purchase Order (PO) Statuses to breakdown your purchasing processes into easy to place stages; helping you maintain accurate control of your inbound stock.

By design, POs will progress through the following pre-set, fixed statuses to signify where the PO is in the purchasing process:

Custom PO statuses will enable you to expand on the Placed stage of this process and openly track how far the PO's progressed since placing it with your supplier, till it's receipted into your inventory. Create statuses that provide useful context to the PO's administrative stage, location or pre-receipting process and streamline your operation. Some examples of custom PO statuses are:

POs can transition freely between Parked, Placed, or custom PO statuses up until the order is in a Receipted or Complete status. This means you can keep a close eye on your purchases and ensure they're aligned with real-world activity up until you've received them into stock.

A PO's status can be updated on the PO's page individually, either by allocating the appropriate status from the order's Save drop-down menu or by moving it across the status boards in the PO Kanban.

Alternatively, you can bulk update the status of multiple POs at once via the View Purchases page:

To review and track your POs by status, including custom PO statuses, you can use View Purchases, the Purchase Enquiry, or the PO Kanban as appropriate.

From View Purchases, you can add shared costs across multiple POs, update statuses or complete PO's in bulk. To make selecting the appropriate PO's requiring bulk updates easier, use the "Status" filter to only display POs of a specific status, or use the Status column header to sort or group the POs populated by their current status.

The Purchase Enquiry is a report designed to provide a detailed breakdown of all your POs at any given status. Use the "Purchase Order Status" filter to run a report that includes only POs with the statuses you've selected. Or, you can use the "Order Status" column header to sort of group the the report by PO status.

The PO Kanban is a visual tool you can use to review and update your open purchases with. POs will automatically be displayed in the kanban boards with a matching PO status, making it easy to identify which of your PO's are at each stage of your purchasing process and manage accordingly.

To create or update your account's custom PO statuses, head to the main menu and navigate through Settings > System > Purchase Order Statuses. For each custom PO status created you can establish a differentiating name and colour via the Purchase Order Statuses page, provided your user role has the "Purchase Order Statuses" permission granted. Any new or updated PO statuses will become immediately available to apply or report on, as soon as they're saved.

Newly added custom PO statuses will be instantly available to apply to POs currently on Placed or another custom PO status.

To add a new custom Purchase Order status:

Once a custom Purchase Order status has been added it can be edited, obsoleted or deleted. Any changes made to an existing custom Purchase Order status will automatically apply to any Purchase Order currently saved with the status.

To update a custom Purchase Order status:

When a custom PO status is no longer going to be applied to POs, but is still in use for existing orders it can be obsoleted by ticking the Obsolete checkbox along the existing status in the Purchase Order Statuses page. Obsoleting the PO status means it won't be available to allocate to POs, but will remain allocated to any previously allocated. To obsolete a custom PO status, tick the Obsolete checkbox along the existing custom Purchase Order status.

When a custom PO status is no longer needed and is not applied to a PO, it can be deleted. To remove a custom PO status click on the bin icon in the Delete column, along the existing status in the Purchase Order Statuses page. The bin icon will not be available if the custom PO status is currently allocated to a Purchase Order.