Raise a purchase order

Who this is for: Storekeeper, Manager, Owner, Accountant — reading the list requires inventory.po.read; raising, sending or cancelling an order requires inventory.po.write; approving one requires inventory.po.approve. Where: Inventory → Purchase Orders

A purchase order is the house's commitment to buy something. It is also the document every later step is checked against: goods are received against an order, and a supplier's invoice is matched against what that order actually delivered.

An order moves through these states:

draft → pending approval → approved → sent → partial → closed

and can be cancelled from anywhere before it closes.

Raise a purchase order#

1. Select New purchase order.
2. Pick the Supplier.
3. Pick the Store the goods will be delivered into.
4. Type your own Reference for the order, if you use one.
5. Pick the Item on the first line.
6. Type the quantity, in the item's purchase unit — bags, not grams.
7. Type the Unit price, or leave it blank to take the supplier's price list price.
8. Select Add line for each further item.
9. Select Create PO.

The order lists as draft, with the supplier, your reference and the order total.

Ten bags and twenty cartons, in purchase units. Both Unit price fields are empty on purpose: leave them and the supplier's price list fills them in, which is how this order came to be US$500.00.

สำคัญ

Quantity is in purchase units, and the store cannot be changed later. Ten bags of coffee is 10, not 10000 — receiving does the conversion. The store is fixed at creation: an order raised into the wrong store has to be cancelled and raised again, because the stock has to land somewhere the count will look.

The total is worked out from the lines every time it is displayed, so it is never stale and there is nothing to recalculate.

Approve an order#

1. Find the draft order.
2. Select Approve.

The badge turns approved and who approved it is recorded against the order.

This is a real gate, not a workflow suggestion. Until an order is approved:

• Send does not appear on it.
• It does not appear on Receiving at all.
• An attempt to send or receive it anyway is refused outright: a purchase order must be approved before it can be sent or received.

Submit moves a draft to pending approval — a queue marker for a house where the person raising orders is not the person approving them. It is optional: Approve is offered on a draft too, so a Manager raising their own order can approve it in one step without pretending to hand it to themselves.

Approving is the one action in this section that a Storekeeper cannot do. inventory.po.approve sits with the Manager, the Owner and the Accountant — the same split as approving a bill in Accounting.

Send an order to the supplier#

1. Find the approved order.
2. Select Send.

The badge turns sent and the time is recorded.

Sending marks the order, it does not transmit it. Nerve does not email the supplier, and there is no PDF to attach. Send is how you record that the order has left the building, so that an order still sitting at approved is visibly one nobody has placed yet.

Sending is optional. An approved order can be received against directly — useful when the goods arrive with the driver who took the order.

Read the status badges#

Badge	Means	What it offers
draft	Raised, committing nothing	Submit, Approve, Cancel
pending approval	Waiting on someone with the approval permission	Approve, Cancel
approved	Cleared to leave and to be received against	Send, Cancel
sent	Recorded as placed with the supplier	Cancel
partial	Some of it has arrived, some is still owed	Cancel
closed	Every line fully received	Nothing — it is done
cancelled	Abandoned	Nothing

partial and closed are set by receiving, not by you: an order closes itself the moment its last outstanding unit is received.

The buttons are the status. A draft offers three things to do with it; an order half-delivered offers one, because everything else about it is now decided at Receiving.

Cancel an order#

1. Find the order.
2. Select Cancel.

Cancelling is available right up until an order closes — including on a partial order, which is how you abandon the tail of a delivery a supplier is never going to complete. It does not reverse anything already received: the stock stays, at the cost it came in at, and the order stops asking for the rest.

A closed or already cancelled order cannot be cancelled again.

What's next#

• Receive goods — the next link in the chain
• Suppliers and price lists — where a blank unit price comes from
• Inventory overview — the whole order-to-payable chain in one place