Creating a New Purchase Order

To create a brand new PO, choose New Purchase Order from the Purchasing menu, or simply hit Ctrl+U. A Purchase Order form will appear.

First off, you will need to choose the Vendor from which you'll be ordering from the list provided. If you have multiple locations, you'll also have to select a Receive To Location from the corresponding drop-down list.

Alternately, if you're planning on having the Vendor drop ship directly to the Customer, click the Drop Ship checkbox, and the available fields will change a bit:

Just select a Customer as well as choose the address to which the order will be sent (if the Customer has more than one).

The icons above the drop-down lists act as buttons to edit the Vendor / Customer / Ship To Address / Receive From Location, or to simply view the Vendor, Customer or Location info.

There are a couple of different ways of adding Items to your order. First, if your company makes use of bar code scanners to keep track of Items, you can place your cursor in the following text box...

...and scan in an example of the Item (s) you'd like to order. Typing the name of the Item and then pressing Tab also works.

Or, choose an Item from the drop-down list on the order grid. Most of the other fields in the grid will auto-fill based on what you select.

 

You can also specify items such as Shipping Method, Freight-on-Board, and Class (a category field used in QuickBooks), the Promise Date, and the Customer PO number, if applicable. The information for the Shipping Method and FOB fields are drawn from their corresponding profile lists. The Sales Rep data is taken from your QuickBooks database.

Additionally, the memo field at the bottom of the dialog serves as a miscellaneous field for the creator to jot down any additional information as well as identify themselves as the person who placed the order.

Now that the order is ready to go, you have a few options as to how to proceed. In the Purchasing / Receiving preferences, you have the option of specifying whether Purchase Orders require approval before they can be received. If your company does have an order approval process, an Approved checkbox will appear on each order, letting users who have appropriate permission levels approve the order for processing.

To automatically create a Receiving Doc from this order, just click the Receive button on the tab's toolbar. A Receiving Doc will appear with the information already filled in. If using order approval, the PO must of course be approved prior to moving on the Receiving Doc stage.

Once finished, you may wish to email a copy of the PO to the Vendor. To do so, simply click the Email button on the tab's toolbar. A PDF of the purchase order will be automatically generated and attached to the outgoing message. To save the SO, just choose one of the options from the Save drop-down menu on the tab's toolbar.

As with all transaction forms in All Orders, keep in mind that you have the option of adding Custom Fields to the transaction by clicking the Custom Fields button. Setting up your custom fields for each field type is done with the Custom Fields tool.