Purchase Orders

A purchase order is how you buy stock from a supplier. It records what you asked for, what it costs, which warehouse it is coming to and when it was promised — then, as deliveries arrive, what actually turned up. Buying from a supplier is different from moving stock you already own. If goods are travelling between your own warehouses, use a Stock Transfer instead — it has no supplier, no cost per unit and no promised date. To manage purchase orders, open Purchase Orders under Inventory.

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Creating one

Click New Purchase Order and fill in: Then add lines — a product variant, how many, and what each unit costs.

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The lifecycle

A purchase order moves through a few states, and each one means something specific for your stock figures. Use Mark as ordered once the order is placed with the supplier. That is the moment the goods start showing as on their way. Back to draft reverses it if you sent it too early.

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Receiving a delivery

When goods arrive, click Receive. Each delivery is recorded as its own stock receipt — numbered, dated, and carrying the packing-slip reference — so an order that arrives in three shipments has three receipts against it. For each line, record what you accepted. If something was refused — damaged, wrong item, short — record that too, with a reason. Accepted units are added to the destination warehouse’s on-hand count and stop being counted as incoming. Because each receipt is kept separately, the order’s history shows what arrived when, rather than one final number.

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Closing an order short

Sometimes a supplier simply will not send the rest. Close short finishes the order with less than you ordered and asks for a reason. The order is marked received and noted as closed short, and the outstanding units stop counting as incoming — so your inventory figures stop promising stock that is not coming.

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Importing and exporting

Purchase orders export to CSV, one row per line — the file you send a supplier. They import from one too. Rows sharing a reference become a single draft order, naming the supplier, warehouse and SKU by name. A name that does not exist fails that row rather than quietly creating something, so a typo is visible instead of becoming a new supplier.

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What it costs you

Stock received through a purchase order carries what the units cost into the stock history. That is what makes “what did this inventory cost us” answerable later, without reconstructing it from supplier invoices.