Raise a purchase order

A purchase order records what you have committed to buy before anything arrives. It is raised as a draft on the web, then submitted and approved — approving is a separate permission from raising, so the person who orders need not be the one who authorises the spending. An approved order can be marked as sent to the supplier and received against; it cannot be edited, so correcting one means rejecting it back to draft. Three separate statuses track it: approval, delivery and invoicing, because an order can be approved with nothing delivered, or delivered and never invoiced.

A purchase order records what you have committed to buy, before anything arrives. It is the first document in the purchasing chain and the thing later documents are checked against.

Raise an order {#raise}

Purchases → Purchase orders → New. Pick the supplier and add the lines you are committing to buy. It saves as a draft, and a draft commits you to nothing — it can be edited or deleted freely.

Submit and approve {#approve}

Submitting sends the order for approval. Approving is a separate permission from raising, so the person who places an order need not be the one who authorises the money. If no approval policy covers the amount, submitting approves the order immediately — that is the configured behaviour, not a fault.

An approved order is locked from editing. To change one, reject it back to draft. This is deliberate: an order somebody authorised at one price should not quietly become an order at another.

The three statuses on an order {#statuses}

An order tracks approval, delivery and invoicing separately, because they move apart in practice. An order can be approved with nothing delivered, or fully delivered and never invoiced.

If an order looks wrong, check all three before assuming a fault — “approved” says nothing about whether the goods arrived.

What happens next

The order is what a delivery is received against, and what a bill is matched against. Recording a delivery from the order rather than from a blank sheet is what makes three-way matching possible later.