Purchase Orders

Purchase Orders is the buying side of your business, kept on your own site. It holds the list of who you buy from and the terms you buy on, it raises the orders you send them, it can hold the big ones back until somebody has approved them, and it keeps a record of every change that nobody can quietly rewrite afterwards.

It stands on its own. You do not need the Shop module and you do not need UK Bookkeeping. A builder, a workshop or a consultancy with no online shop and no books on the site still buys things, and the module is a complete purchasing system on such a site rather than a stub. Where those modules are installed, it makes use of them - see What it does with your other modules.

One sidebar link. Everything lives under the one Purchase Orders link, with tabs across the top of the page: Orders, Receiving, Bills, Returns, Suppliers, Reorder and Reports.

What is in it

The module is finished: everything below is in it, and the buying side of a business is covered end to end.

Suppliers - who you buy from, how to reach them, and the terms.
Purchase orders - raise, edit, approve, send, acknowledge, hold, close, cancel.
The order as a document - designed by you, in the same editor as everything else, printed as a PDF and emailed to the supplier with that PDF attached.
Revisions - change an order they already have and the copy they were sent is kept exactly as it was, for good.
Receiving - tick off what actually turned up against what you ordered, note what went back and why, and have your stock counts go up on their own if you keep them.
Returns - send goods back to a supplier, print and email them a returns note, and keep track of the credit you are owed until it turns up.
Supplier bills - enter their invoice, attach their PDF, have it checked against what you ordered and what turned up, query it or approve it for payment.
A history on every order, every return and every bill, saying who did what and when.
Bills and credits going through to the books by themselves, where you run UK Bookkeeping.
Reordering - a level per product, and the draft orders that follow when you drop below it, grouped by supplier and mindful of their minimum.
Buying for a customer order - one draft per supplier off what somebody has just bought, delivered straight to them, either at the press of a button or the moment they pay.
Suppliers' price lists - their own catalogue kept on file, so an order is drafted at what they charge today, and you are told the week a code is renamed or stopped.
Proforma suppliers - the ones who invoice before they will confirm anything. Their order waits for their proforma, waits again while you pay it, and only then can they confirm it.
A link for the supplier - their own view of their own order, where they can download it, send you their proforma, confirm it with their own acknowledgement attached, give you a date line by line, tell you something is short, and say what has actually left them - and change nothing at all.
Their paperwork, filed from either end - the proforma and the acknowledgement can come through their link or be uploaded by you, and their own reference number is read off the file where you have left the box empty.
Proof of payment - the screenshot or the remittance, filed against the order and sent to the supplier on the payment email, to their accounts department where that is a different desk.
Despatches and packing slips - a supplier who sends an order in three lorries tells you about all three, with a tracking number and a tracking link each, and takes away a packing slip for every box.
Reports - what you have committed to and not yet had, what is late, goods in without an invoice, invoices in without the goods, and what you spend with whom.
Chasing - a note to a supplier whose order is late, on the schedule you set, or one you send yourself.
Four spreadsheets to take away, and a tile on your dashboard.

Who can do what

Purchasing is a set of permissions on your core roles, set from Users → Roles:

purchase-orders.access - see Purchase Orders at all.
purchase-orders.create - raise and edit orders, and manage the supplier list.
purchase-orders.approve - approve an order that is over your threshold, or send it back.
purchase-orders.receive - book deliveries in, and send goods back. Also recording a despatch a supplier has emailed you about, which purchase-orders.create can do as well.
purchase-orders.bills - enter, query and approve supplier invoices, and record a credit when it arrives.
purchase-orders.catalogues - keep suppliers' price lists, and import them.
purchase-orders.settings - change the settings.

Anybody holding any one of the first six can see the section, so somebody whose only job is approving orders is not left staring at a page telling them off.

Administrators hold all seven without being given them, as they do everywhere else.

Suppliers

Purchase Orders → Suppliers is your own list, and it is yours whether or not you sell anything online.

For each one you can record the contact details, the account number you buy under, their VAT number, an address, and the terms you actually buy on:

How we buy from them - a credit account, or proforma. Proforma means they invoice before they will confirm anything, and it changes what their own link does: see Suppliers who want paying first.
Accounts department, and send the payment note to accounts - their finance desk, where that is a different inbox from the one that takes orders. On proforma terms it usually is: the address to send the payment to is printed on the invoice. Tick the box and the "we have paid your proforma" note, with your proof of payment attached, goes there instead. Everything else - the order, an amendment, a chase, a cancellation - still goes to the people who take orders, and your Copy to address is copied in either way. The box needs an accounts address to tick.
Payment terms, both as words ("Net 30") and as a number of days, so a later release can work out when a bill is due.
Lead time, in days.
Minimum order value - the order screen tells you when you are under it.
Carriage paid over and carriage charge.
Sale surcharge - some suppliers charge more for clearance stock bought under a small order. Set the order value below which it applies (goods plus carriage, net), and what each category of stock costs per unit - a category is whatever you typed into the Category column when you uploaded their price list (Purchase Orders → Catalogues). Leave the threshold empty and nothing changes. See Sold on sale, bought on sale for how it is worked out and added.
Discount - the percentage you have off their list. It is used when you import a price list of theirs that quotes retail prices, and nowhere else; leave it empty for a supplier who sends you trade prices already. Empty is not the same as 0%: one is "nothing recorded", the other is "we have checked, and they give us nothing".
A message on their own order page - a standing note this supplier reads at the top of every purchase order link you send them. Quote the account number, ring before delivering, nothing after three. It goes to them and only them: never on the order document, never on a packing slip, never in an email. See The supplier's own link. Notes, at the bottom of the same form, is the opposite - that one is for you, and never leaves the building.

Status is Enabled, On hold or Disabled. Disabled keeps the record and every order filed against it, and simply drops the name out of the list you pick from. On hold does the same, but says why: it is for a supplier you have stopped buying from for now rather than one you have finished with.

Deleting a supplier is refused while there are orders against them. That is deliberate - the alternative is a purchase order that no longer says who it went to.

Suppliers who drop-ship

Tick This supplier drop-ships on a supplier whose goods go straight to your customer and never come to you. On their orders:

Book goods in and Record a despatch are not offered, and the Deliveries card and the Received / Still due columns stay away. Nothing is going to arrive, so nothing asks you to count it. (Anything that was booked in before you ticked the box stays on the record.)
Their invoice is checked against what you ordered, not against what was delivered. Without this every invoice from a drop-shipper was flagged "nothing has been booked in yet" - true, permanent, and therefore noise. Price and total are checked exactly as before, and an invoice for more than you ordered is still flagged.
The order's status line stops saying it is waiting for the goods.
Their invoice for the lot counts as the goods arriving. Nothing from them is ever booked in, so once every line on the order is invoiced in full (less anything given up) and they owe you nothing back, the order finishes itself straight from Sent or Acknowledged, exactly as a delivered order does. If any invoice on it is still a draft or queried - the usual case when it came by email or through their link - it goes to Pending close and waits there until somebody presses Close. If every invoice on it is already approved or voided - typically because you have just approved the last one you typed in - it goes straight to Closed. An order on hold is left alone, and every other supplier works exactly as before.

It is a switch on the supplier rather than the order, and it applies to their open orders as well as new ones. The supplier's own link still lets them tell you when something has left, and anything they report still shows on the order.

Linking to a catalogue supplier

If you have the Shop module, each purchasing supplier can be linked to the supplier name your products are filed under. That is what lets the line editor offer their products first when you are raising an order.

The link stores both the id and a copy of the name. If you later rename or delete that supplier in the shop, this record keeps working and simply says the link is no longer there. Your purchase orders are not the sort of thing that should go blank because somebody tidied the catalogue.

Raising a purchase order

Purchase Orders → Orders → New purchase order.

Pick the supplier, add your lines, and say where the goods should go.

Lines can be typed in from scratch, or - with the Shop module installed - searched straight out of your catalogue, in which case the name, your own code and the cost price come across with them. Both work on the same order. Not everything a business buys is something it sells, and a module that insisted otherwise would be no use for buying paper.

Each line carries a quantity, a unit ("each", "box", "metre" - it is your word, not ours), a unit cost to four decimal places, an optional discount percentage, and a tax rate.

"each" is never printed. It is the unit every line starts with, so printing it put the word after every quantity on every document, email and screen - "4 each", "1 each", "12 each" - which is noise dressed up as information. A quantity with nothing beside it is a count, and a count is what it nearly always is. Type anything else in the box - boxes, metres, pallets, rolls - and it prints everywhere, because those genuinely change what the number means. The word itself stays in the box and in the CSV export, so you can see what a line is set to and type over it.

Why four decimal places on the cost. Supplier costs routinely go below the penny, and the sums are done to the penny only once, at the line. Two hundred and fifty of something at £1.005 is £251.25, and a system that rounded the unit price first would tell you £250 or £252.50 and then disagree with the supplier's invoice.

Deliver to is one of three things: your own address (which you set once, in the settings), straight to the customer, or somewhere else entirely. Sites that drop-ship should set the default to the customer and stop thinking about it.

There is a box for delivery instructions beside it - the gate code, the side entrance, where to go if nobody answers - and on an order raised from a shop order it fills itself in. Where the Shop is asking customers where to leave things (Shop → Settings → Delivery instructions), whatever the customer wrote comes across word for word as the order is drafted. On a drop-ship the driver works for the supplier, not for you, so an instruction that never reaches the purchase order never reaches the lorry. Type over it if you need to and what you typed stays put; nothing writes over the box after the order has been drafted.

Notes come in two kinds, and the labels say which is which: notes for the supplier print on the order, notes for us never leave the building.

The totals update as you type. They are worked out again on the server when you save, so what is stored is never whatever the browser happened to think.

Carriage, surcharge and any order discount are line items, not totals. On the order screen, on the printed order and in the lines of the email to the supplier they sit as rows of their own under the goods. The totals on the order screen and the printed order are only ever three: Subtotal (goods, carriage and surcharge, less any order discount), VAT and Total. On the printed order, where each line's delivery service is priced on its own row and those rows add up to the carriage, they are the carriage and no separate Carriage row is printed; change the carriage by hand and the delivery rows keep their names, drop their figures, and one Carriage row carries the real amount - so the rows on the page always add up to the subtotal. The {{SUBTOTAL}} placeholder prints the same figure.

Approvals

Off by default. Switch "Big orders need approving before they go out" on in the settings and set a threshold, and any order whose total reaches that figure has to be approved by somebody holding purchase-orders.approve before it can be sent.

Set the threshold to 0 to have every order approved, which is what a business that wants two pairs of eyes on everything is asking for.

An order that is under the threshold - or a site that leaves approvals off - goes straight out. Nobody is made to approve something the settings say does not need it.

An approver can also send it back, with a note, which drops it to draft for whoever raised it.

Suppliers who want paying first

Some suppliers will not lift a finger until the money is in. Set How we buy from them to Proforma on the supplier and every order you raise for them knows it.

What happens then:

You send the order as usual.
The supplier opens their link and it tells them, in as many words, that you pay this one up front. They send you their proforma invoice through the page, with their own invoice number and the amount if it is not simply the order total. Or they email it, or post it, and you file it yourself - see Filing their paperwork yourself.
You get an email, the file is filed in your media library under Purchasing, and it turns up on the order under Proforma and supplier documents with a link to open it.
If you have a screenshot of the payment or a remittance, put it against the order as the proof of payment - the same Choose file arrangement, in its own row.
Somebody here presses Mark the proforma as paid, with your payment reference if you want one recorded. That is a person's decision, with their name against it - nothing guesses it off a bank feed. With a proof of payment on the order the button reads Mark it paid and send the proof, and the tick box beside it is what decides whether the file travels.
They are emailed the moment you press it, with your payment reference, what was paid, their own proforma number, your proof of payment attached if you asked for it, and a fresh link to the order. That email always goes - it is not a tick box - because on these terms the supplier is doing nothing at all until they know the money has left, and a payment nobody mentioned is a week of silence at both ends. Reword it under Settings → Emails → Templates, as Proforma paid.
The supplier's page changes the moment you do. Now, and not before, they can confirm the order.

The proof of payment is the thing that actually gets an order released. "We have paid it" is a sentence; a picture of the payment is evidence, and most accounts departments want the second one. It is filed against the order rather than living in somebody's sent items, so the answer to what did we send them is on the order six weeks later. If you file one after you have already marked the proforma paid, the card offers Email them the proof on its own - and Send the proof again once it has gone, for the supplier who has lost it.

If that email cannot go, the screen says so - no email address on the supplier, or emails switched off - and the payment still stands. Recording that money has left the building is not something to undo because a mail server was busy; you are simply told to pick the phone up.

Until that button is pressed the supplier's confirm button is not there, and the page says why: "Send us your proforma first. We will pay it, and then you can confirm the order here." It is a proper stop rather than a hint, because a supplier who confirms before the money has moved is exactly the confusion this is here to prevent.

The status says where it has got to. An order on proforma terms is sent for the whole of the dance, which is true and tells nobody anything, so the badge says the useful thing instead: Waiting for proforma, then Proforma received - in the colour the module uses for "somebody here has to do something" - and then Proforma paid. It reads the same way on the Orders list, so a screenful of orders shows at a glance which ones are sitting on your desk. Once the supplier confirms, the badge goes back to saying Acknowledged, which by then is the more useful fact. Nothing underneath has changed: filtering the Orders list by status still works off the real statuses, and the order document prints the real one.

It is frozen onto the order. Whether an order waits for a proforma is decided when it is raised, off the supplier's terms at that moment. Move a supplier onto an account next year and last year's orders still read as they always did.

And it can be overridden per order. A one-off from a supplier you have an account with who wants the money up front, or a proforma supplier who has agreed to put this one on the account: the card on the order has a link either way. It is under Proforma and supplier documents, and it disappears once the proforma is marked paid.

If you press paid by mistake, Take that back undoes it. The proforma itself stays where it is; only the payment is unwound.

Filing their paperwork yourself

Not every supplier will use the link. Plenty email the proforma, attach the acknowledgement to a reply, or post the thing - and before, that left you with a file in your inbox and an order that said not here yet for ever.

Proforma and supplier documents on the order takes all three files from this end, with a Choose file button on each row: their proforma, their acknowledgement, and your own proof of payment. A PDF, JPEG, PNG or WebP up to 15 MB. Whichever way a file arrives - through their link or from you - it lands in the same place, is filed in your media library under Purchasing, and shows on the order as a link to open.

Their own number is read off the file. Every supplier puts their reference on their paperwork next to a label saying what it is - Invoice No. on a proforma, Sales No. on an acknowledgement - and where you have left the box empty, that is where the number comes from. The screen tells you it did it and shows you what it read.

Two things it will not do. It never overwrites a number you have typed - if the box has something in it, that is the answer. And it never reads your order number back to you off their paperwork, which is on there too, usually under Cust Order No.

Every number is yours to type or correct. Both boxes - Their invoice number on the proforma, Their sales order number on the acknowledgement - take a number straight from you, with a Save button that appears the moment you change one. For a supplier who reads it down the phone, a scan with nothing readable in it, a photograph, or a guess that read the wrong line, just type it in. Emptying the box clears it.

Files are stored and checked for being what they claim to be. They are not scanned for viruses - nothing on this platform is, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.

Reading a supplier's documents

Underneath all of this is a reader that goes through a supplier's PDF a page at a time, which matters because plenty of suppliers send a day's invoices as one file: one invoice to a page, each for a different order.

For each document it finds in a file it works out:

What it is - a proforma, their acknowledgement (a Sales Order or Order Acknowledgement), a VAT invoice or a credit note. It reads the document's own heading first, then the filename, then the email's subject. A Pro Forma Invoice is a proforma, whatever the word Invoice on the end of it thinks.
Their reference - the invoice, proforma, credit note or sales order number.
Which of your orders it is for - by looking for the purchase order numbers you actually issued, exactly, rather than trusting whatever label the supplier put beside them. It will never read one of yours back as theirs.
The date and the total, where it can find them.
Which pages it runs to. A new document starts on a page with a different reference; a page with no reference of its own (the second page of a long invoice) stays with the one before it.

It can also cut a document's pages out into a file of its own, encrypted files included, keeping everything else about the original exactly as it was. It checks every file it cuts by reading it back, and refuses anything it is not sure of - files that have been edited and re-saved, and a few ways of building a PDF that it deliberately does not handle. Where it refuses, the whole original is used instead: slower to read, never wrong.

On its own this changes one thing you will see: on Enter a bill, the date now fills in on invoice layouts that print the date across the page from its label, which it previously missed, and a file of several invoices fills the boxes from the first invoice in it. The rest of a multi-invoice file is filed by the next section, if you switch it on.

Supplier paperwork from email

If the Unified Inbox is installed, purchasing can file the paperwork your suppliers email you without anybody opening it: the proforma, their acknowledgement, and the VAT invoice, including the daily batch that arrives as one PDF with an invoice to a page. It is off until you switch it on, under Settings → Purchase Orders → Supplier paperwork by email.

What it does

When an email arrives from one of your suppliers with a PDF on it, the file is read within half an hour - often straight away. Each document in it is filed on the purchase order it quotes:

A proforma goes in the proforma slot on the order, with their reference, the amount and the date the email came. If it comes to more or less than the order, beyond your price tolerance, the order says so and you are emailed.
A revised proforma - any second proforma for the same order that cannot be shown to be the very same document (the same number and the same amount, both readable) - replaces the first on the order, but loudly. The order then carries the new one's number and amount, never the old ones beside the new file. The first stays in your media library and in the order's history, and you are emailed. That is not paranoia: a "revised invoice" with new bank details is the commonest fraud there is, and an email cannot prove who sent it.
A second proforma for a different amount says so: an extra charge, or a revision? Suppliers do send a separate proforma for an extra charge, and only a person can tell which it is.
The same goes for a second proforma sent through the supplier's own link: it replaces the first with its own number and amount, raises the same warning, and is refused outright once the proforma is paid.
While any such warning stands, the proforma cannot be marked paid until somebody ticks I have checked the bank details on this proforma with the supplier, on a number we already hold. Their name goes in the order's history. The warning stays until then, whatever arrives afterwards - a second copy of the same "revised" proforma does not make it go away - and a new warning after the tick needs a new tick - including one that arrives while the box is ticked, which is refused with a sentence and shown to you before you can tick again.
Once a proforma is paid, nothing arriving by email replaces it. A new one waits on the Paperwork list with a sentence telling you to ring the supplier, on a number you already have, before doing anything with it.
Their acknowledgement (a sales order or order confirmation) goes in the acknowledgement slot with their sales order number, and marks the order acknowledged straight away - even on an order whose proforma you have not paid yet, because they have accepted the order and that is what acknowledged means. The badge then reads Acknowledged, proforma to pay until you pay it, so the money you owe does not drop out of sight.
A VAT invoice whose total agrees with what is left to invoice on the order (within your price tolerance) becomes a draft bill for everything still left to invoice on that order - with the order's carriage and sale surcharge on it too if it is the first invoice against the order, exactly as when you enter one yourself - priced at the prices on your order - never the supplier's - with the total printed on their invoice kept beside it, so any difference shows. Their invoice is attached to the bill: just its own page, cut out of the batch, or where the file cannot safely be cut, the whole file with a note saying which page is theirs. When that leaves nothing on the order un-invoiced and everything has arrived, the order moves to Pending close, exactly as when a supplier invoices through their own link.

Each filed document is copied into your media library under Purchasing, beside that order's other paperwork. The email and its original attachment stay in the inbox as they were.

On the conversation in the inbox you will see a line such as Filed on PO-01234 as the proforma, with the order linked. When the file was too big to deal with the moment it arrived, the line says Passed to Purchasing to file instead, and the order or the Paperwork list is where to look. On the order, a Filed from their email card lists each document with a link to the email it came on and the day it arrived.

What it does not do

It never pays anything, never approves a bill, never sends anything to a supplier, and never puts anything in the books. A bill it writes is a draft, and somebody reads it before a penny moves - which is the whole reason Pending close exists.

When it will not file something

A document is filed only when it is certain: exactly one of your order numbers is on it, that order went to the supplier who sent it, and it has arrived at a sensible moment - no proforma on a cancelled order, no invoice on a draft nobody has sent, no proforma on an order that is on their account. Anything else waits at the top of the Orders tab under Paperwork, with one sentence saying why. That includes, always:

credit notes, which are left for a person in this version;
a document it cannot tell the kind of;
a file quoting none of your orders, or several;
a file the inbox could not fetch from the mail server;
a scan or a picture where the only clue is the filename or the email's subject - it will not write a bill, or file a proforma, on the strength of what somebody called the file;
an invoice whose total does not match what is left to invoice - "Their invoice says £46.80 but £170.34 is left to invoice on PO-00031 - a part invoice or an extra charge? File it by hand." - or whose total could not be read. Filing one of those by hand writes the bill for everything left, and the difference shows on the bill for you to adjust.

For each one you can file it on this order (pick one of that supplier's orders and say what the document is), say it is not ours, or ignore it. Filing it by hand goes through exactly the same rules, so it will still refuse an invoice onto an order that is fully invoiced, and say so.

You are emailed about anything that lands on that list, and about a proforma that disagrees with its order - once each, and never to say all went well.

Who counts as a supplier

Mail is only looked at if it comes from one of your suppliers:

from the email or copy-to address on the supplier, exactly, or
from anybody at the same domain as the supplier's email address - their staff write from all sorts of addresses - unless it is a free email service such as gmail.com or outlook.com, where only the exact address counts. The copy-to address is matched exactly but its domain is not used, because it is often somebody here. Or
from anything listed under Their paperwork also comes from on the supplier, for an accounts system on a different domain or a second trading name. A domain listed there also covers its subdomains.

An email between colleagues - everybody it was sent to at the sender's own domain - is never matched to a supplier by its domain, whatever is on a supplier record, so a PDF forwarded round the office is not mistaken for the supplier's. A supplier who puts one of their own colleagues in the To line beside you is still recognised. One who writes To a colleague of their own with you in Cc is recognised too.

Everything else is ignored in an instant, which is nearly all of your post. The same invoice arriving twice, or the inbox offering the same email again, never produces a second bill.

Delivery tracking from email

The other thing your suppliers' post brings is tracking: the supplier replying on the order's thread with a link or a number, or the courier they booked writing to you directly - a two-person delivery firm's "your order is now with us" and "your timeslot is confirmed", or a parcel carrier's "we're expecting your parcel". With the Unified Inbox installed, purchasing can read those and record each one as a despatch on the order it is about, so you are not copying consignment numbers from one window to another. It is off until you switch it on, under Settings → Purchase Orders → Delivery tracking by email - a switch of its own, separate from the paperwork one, because it reads couriers' mail as well as suppliers' and what it records can go on to reach your customer.

What it reads

From the email's own text - never the quoted history underneath a reply, so last week's tracking quoted back at you is not mistaken for news:

a tracking link: a parcel carrier's own page, a follow-my-parcel link, AIT Home Delivery's short link (aithd.com/kz0vkrz, letters-only code and all), a delivery firm's page that names the parcel and the postcode, or any other link that is plainly about tracking a particular parcel. A generic "track your order" page with nothing in it is not one, and neither are the little pictures, "rate your delivery" surveys and unsubscribe links every such email carries;
a parcel or consignment number printed beside a label like Consignment, Tracking number or Your parcel, spaces and all;
the delivery day and timeslot, where it gives them - including "out for delivery today, ETA 1-4pm" from the supplier. A window with no day is not taken as a booking: "collect from them between 11 and 6" is opening hours;
the supplier's own order number, and the delivery postcode.

Which order it is for

It has to be certain, and it tries the strongest evidence first:

One of your order numbers, from that supplier, on one of their orders - a reply on the order's own thread.
The supplier's own reference you already hold - the sales order number from their acknowledgement, or their proforma number - even printed without its leading zeros, as delivery firms do (their 123456 is your supplier's 0000123456). From a courier rather than the supplier, only a number printed beside Order number or Sales order counts - never Your order or Our ref, which on a courier's email are their own numbers - and it has to be at least six characters long, or the delivery postcode in the email has to be the order's.
A parcel already on one of your despatches - the second and third emails about the same parcel.
The delivery postcode alone, when exactly one order going straight to a customer at that postcode is still waiting to be sent - or has been sent and is still waiting to hear its delivery slot, which is exactly when a delivery firm's "your timeslot is confirmed" email turns up quoting nothing but its link and the postcode. Once you have said yes to one of those, the firm's later emails about a new day carry the same link and go straight on.

The first three are recorded straight away, with two exceptions that go to the Paperwork list instead, saying why:

The email gives a different delivery postcode from the order's - even from your supplier, quoting your order number. It looks like that order's delivery and is going somewhere else, which is exactly when somebody should look.
A courier is the first word that an order has gone. On an order with nothing despatched yet, an email from anybody but your supplier is only recorded by itself when it quotes the supplier's order number and the right delivery postcode. Anything less waits for you.

The fourth never is: a wrong guess there would put one customer's delivery on another customer's order, so it waits at the top of the Orders tab under Paperwork with the tracking, the day and the postcode, and a Yes, that one button. It is not ours and Ignore it are there as usual.

Only your suppliers may use the first rule - anybody can type a number that looks like yours.

Links from strangers. Anybody on the internet can send an email with a "tracking" link to a page of their own, and that link would end up in front of your customer. So a link in an email from anybody but your supplier is only kept when it goes to a known carrier (DPD, Royal Mail, Evri, UPS, DHL and the like, the Multidrop-style pages, GFS, AIT Home Delivery) or to the sender's own website - a delivery firm linking its own tracking page (never a free email service: somebody writing from a gmail address does not vouch for a gmail.com link). Anything else is left out and only the parcel number kept, and where what is left would start a new despatch, it waits on the Paperwork list. If one of your couriers links a tracking site on a different address, list it under Also trust tracking links to in the settings - a whole website, such as tracking.yourcourier.co.uk; an ending on its own, like co.uk, is refused. An email from anybody else (the courier, the delivery firm) is read only when it actually carries tracking, which is how a courier's email is recognised: by what is in it, not by a list of couriers, so it works for one nobody has heard of. Mail between your own colleagues is never read for tracking.

What it records

A new despatch covering everything on the order still to be sent, marked From an email with the tracking on the What the supplier has sent card, with the carrier (named off the link, or off the courier's own email address), the number, the link, and the day and slot when known. It moves no stock and changes no status, exactly like a despatch the supplier files through their link.
Later news about the same parcel updates that despatch rather than adding another: a timeslot, a new day, or a link where it had none. A number or link already on it is never replaced - a different one is a second parcel, or somebody else's link, not news about this one.
A parcel that went out with no tracking gets the tracking filled in.
Where everything on the order has already gone under other tracking, it is left alone and nothing is overwritten.

The order's history names the email each despatch came from. On the conversation in the inbox you will see a line such as Tracking recorded on PO-01234 as despatch DSP-00007, with the order linked - or, for the postcode-only kind, that it is waiting on the Paperwork list.

The same email offered twice, or two couriers' emails about the same parcel arriving together, still makes one despatch.

Your customer's order

On an order going straight to a customer that was raised from one of their shop orders, the despatch - and each later change to its tracking, day or slot - is passed to the shop. What the shop does with it is the shop's own setting (Settings → Shop → Notifications → Tracking from your suppliers), off until you choose: leave the customer's order alone, put the parcel on it quietly, or put it on and tell the customer. See Shop. A despatch on an order coming to your own warehouse stays in purchasing.

The order screen

Open an order and everything you can do to it is in one bar across the top, and that bar stays put however far down the page you scroll.

The solid button is the one thing an order in this state is waiting for: email it, approve it, book the goods in, close it. There is only ever one.
- Once an order has gone out, that one thing is usually the next piece of paperwork, and the button opens a small window for it rather than sending you down the page to find the right card:
  1. Upload their proforma - for a supplier who invoices before they confirm. The file, their invoice number (left empty, it is read off the file) and what they are invoicing.
  2. Upload proof of payment - the screenshot or remittance, your payment reference, and a tick to send the proof with the "we have paid" email. This is what marks the proforma as paid.
  3. Upload their acknowledgement - the file and their sales order number, and a tick (on by default) that marks the order as confirmed by the supplier in the same go.
    - No acknowledgement coming? Plenty of suppliers never send one. No acknowledgement? Enter their invoice sits beside the button and opens step 4 straight away, with the same tick (on by default) to mark the order as confirmed off the back of the invoice. Once any invoice is in against the order, it stops asking for the acknowledgement at all.
  4. Enter their invoice - choose the file and their number, date and total are read off it where they can be. Everything still to be invoiced is proposed at the prices you ordered at, with the carriage and any sale surcharge (on the first invoice only - once anything on the order has been invoiced, both start at nothing); change what their invoice says differently and save. It is checked against the order the moment it is saved, and you are told whether it agrees. Anything stranger - a charge that was never on the order - belongs on the full bill form, which is one link away.
- A supplier on a credit account simply starts at step 3. If goods are still on their way to you, Book goods in stays the solid button and the invoice sits beside it - the lorry usually beats the invoice. When there is no paperwork left and nothing left to arrive, the solid button is Close the order.
- Anything that goes wrong in one of those windows is said inside it, not behind it.
Beside it are the everyday ones - Edit (or Amend, once the supplier has it), View document, Email it again, Book goods in, Enter a bill.
More holds the rest: the PDF, recording a despatch, sending something back, making a link for the supplier, putting it on hold, marking it as sent without emailing, cancelling it, deleting a draft. Cancelling and deleting ask first.
Add a note opens a box in the bar. Whatever is in it goes in the email if you send the order, and into the history against whatever you do next.
If something goes wrong - or right - the message appears in the bar too, so it is in front of you wherever on the page you were.

On a phone the everyday buttons fold into More, so the bar stays one row deep rather than half the screen.

Under the bar is one sentence saying where the order stands: a draft nobody has sent, sent on Tuesday and waiting for their proforma, part delivered, on hold. It is worked out from the order every time you open it, which is rather the point - see the note below.

Then the order itself, in two columns where there is room. The wide one runs in the order things happen: the lines, then Getting it here (what the supplier says they have sent, what has actually been booked in, what has gone back), then Paying for it (their proforma and paperwork, and their bills), then The supplier's side (their link, and what they have told you through it). The narrow one is what you glance at: the details, the full delivery address with its contact and instructions, the notes, past revisions and the history. Cards with nothing to say - deliveries on a draft, returns on an order nothing has arrived for - stay out of the way until they have.

What is left on the cards is only what cannot leave them: the file picker beside the document it files, the reference box beside its Save, Stop it on the row of the link it stops.

Editing uses the same bar, with two buttons in it: Save and Cancel. The form runs in the order you fill it in - supplier and dates, lines, what it comes to, where it is going, notes - with currency and tax last, because on nearly every order they are already right. The exchange rate only appears when the order is in a foreign currency. On an amendment the bar also asks what has changed, and Save stays greyed out, saying why, until you have told it.

Why the status sentence is worked out, not written down. Orders drafted automatically from a paid customer order used to be given an internal note ending "Nobody has read it and nothing has been sent to the supplier." That was true when it was written and a note is only written once - so an order that had since been emailed, confirmed and delivered went on announcing that nothing had been sent. The note now only says where the order came from, which stays true for ever (and keeps the customer order number searchable from the orders list). Anything about where an order has got to comes from the order itself. Existing orders have the stale sentence taken off them the next time the module updates; anything you typed into the note yourself is left exactly as it was.

The life of an order

Status	What it means
Draft	Being written. Freely editable, and the only status that can be deleted outright.
Awaiting approval	Over your threshold, waiting for somebody who can approve it.
Approved	Cleared to go.
Sent	Gone to the supplier.
Acknowledged	They have confirmed it.
Part received	Some of it has turned up.
Received	All of it has.
Pending close	Everything has turned up and the supplier says they have invoiced the lot - and those invoices are still waiting for somebody here to read.
Closed	Finished with.
Cancelled	Called off. The record and the number stay.
On hold	Paused, deliberately.

Every one of those changes is written to the order's own history, with who did it, when, and any note they left.

A draft is yours to change as you like. Once an order has gone to the supplier, changing it is an amendment - see Changing an order they already have.

Only a draft can be deleted. Anything that has been out into the world gets cancelled instead, so the number and the trail survive. Cancel one the supplier has actually been sent and they are emailed about it, because a supplier who never hears is a supplier who delivers it anyway.

Telling the customer. The first time an order raised for a customer's order goes to the supplier, whether emailed or marked as sent without emailing, Purchase Orders announces it to other modules (see below). With the Shop installed, that moves the customer's order from Processing to Preparing and emails them. An amendment, or marking an already-sent order as sent again, announces nothing.

For module authors: `purchase-orders.sent`

An observer extension point, modelled on purchase-orders.despatch-recorded. Fired once, for the first send of a purchase order, with primitives only so nothing imports this module:

{
  "point": "purchase-orders.sent",
  "id": "your-observer-id",
  "serverOnly": true,
  "import": "./lib/your-observer",
  "component": "yourObserver"
}

The function receives { purchaseOrderNumber: string, source: { module: 'shop', orderId: string } | null }. source is null for an order raised by hand or by a reorder run. It never fails the send: a throwing observer is logged and the next one still runs. Be idempotent.

Checking goods in

Purchase Orders → Receiving. Two lists: what is still to come, and what has already turned up.

"Still to come" is worked out from the lines rather than from the status, which is the only way it stays honest. An order nobody got round to closing is not on the list if everything on it arrived, and one marked received that later had a delivery removed is back on it.

Booking a delivery in

Press Book in beside an order. You get every line, with what was ordered, what has already been had, and what is still due - and the accepted box already filled in with the balance, because the overwhelmingly common case is "it all came" and typing eleven numbers to say so is how people stop booking deliveries in at all.

Accepted - what you are keeping.
Rejected - what turned up and went straight back. Rejected goods are never counted as received, so the line stays outstanding and the supplier still owes it.
A note per line - condition, batch numbers, or why it went back.
Their delivery note, the carrier and the date - so you can find the delivery again from their paperwork rather than yours.

Save it and the order's status keeps up on its own: part received while anything is short, received once every line has had what it was owed. An order deliberately put on hold stays on hold - that was somebody's decision, and it is not arithmetic's to overrule.

More than you ordered

Suppliers send full cases. Over-delivery is allowed, always: you tell the module how much of it you will take without comment under Settings → Purchase Orders → Checking what arrives, and anything past that is flagged on the screen before you save and recorded in the order's history afterwards. It is never refused - a delivery note that will not match the pallet is worse than useless, and their invoice will have to answer for the difference soon enough.

When the rest is never coming

Sometimes four of the ten simply are not going to arrive. Open the order and press Give up on the rest beside the line: the quantity ordered stays exactly as it was, the shortfall is marked cancelled, and the line stops being outstanding - which lets the order finish instead of sitting open for ever. Nothing is deleted, so what you ordered and what you got both stay readable.

Stock

If you keep stock counts and you have switched Add goods to stock when they arrive on, tick the box when you book a delivery in and the counts go up by what you accepted. Anybody waiting for one of those products to come back is emailed at the same time.

Some things worth knowing:

It happens once. Pressing the button twice, or two people pressing it at the same moment, cannot put the delivery on the shelf twice.
Recording a delivery and moving stock are separate. You can book deliveries in for months with the setting off, switch it on later, and the paperwork is all still there.
Products with no count are not a failure. Plenty of things are made to order or shipped straight to the customer. Those lines simply say there was nothing to change.
Half units cannot move a count. A count holds whole things. Two and a half metres of cable is a perfectly good delivery and the line will say so rather than quietly rounding it.
Removing a delivery puts the stock back. Deleting the paperwork and leaving the shelf figure where it was is how a stock count stops meaning anything.

Deliveries need the purchase-orders.receive permission. Everybody with purchase-orders.access can see them.

Sending things back

Purchase Orders → Returns. The tab opens with the only figure that really matters: how much money suppliers still owe you on goods that have already gone back. Raising a return is easy and everybody does it; noticing six months later that four of them were never credited is the thing this screen exists to stop.

Raising one

Open the purchase order and press Send something back, under More. You only get the option once something has actually been delivered - nothing can go back that never arrived.

You get every line that has turned up, with what was delivered and what has already gone back. Nothing is filled in for you: the common case is one line out of eight, and a form that starts by proposing to send everything back is a form somebody will one day save by accident.

Sending back - how many. You cannot send back more than turned up; the module will say so rather than letting you claim for twelve when ten were delivered.
Came in on - which delivery they arrived on. It prints on the note, which is what lets the supplier's own goods-in desk find them, and it is what decides whether the goods can come off a stock count.
Why they are going back - the paragraph the supplier actually decides on. Worth writing properly.
Notes - collection arrangements, packaging, anything else.

The credit you are claiming is worked out from the order's own prices, not typed in. It is the same arithmetic the order used, so a claim can never round a penny differently from the order it is claiming against.

Its life

A return goes draft → sent → credit promised → credited → closed, and can be cancelled up until the money arrives.

Only a draft can be edited. Once the supplier is holding a copy, changing it quietly is how they stop trusting your paperwork - cancel it and raise another.
The credit has arrived takes the amount and their credit note number. Leave the amount blank and it credits the whole claim, which is the ordinary case.
You do not have to say they promised first. Plenty of suppliers simply send the credit note, and clicking "they promised" about money already in the bank is silly.
Raising, sending and cancelling need purchase-orders.receive. Saying the credit has arrived needs purchase-orders.bills - it is a bookkeeping fact, not a goods-in one.

The returns note

Every return has its own document, designed the same way the order is - see The returns note below. View note opens it, Download PDF saves it, and Email it to the supplier sends it with the PDF attached.

Stock

If you keep stock counts and you have the purchasing stock setting on, Take these off stock deducts what is going back.

It is a separate button on purpose. A note can be raised on Monday and the pallet collected on Thursday, and deducting on Monday would show three days of a shortage nobody could explain.

Only goods that were put on a count can come off one. If the delivery those goods arrived on was never added to stock - or nobody said which delivery it was - the line says so rather than inventing a shortage out of paperwork.
It happens once. Two people pressing the button at the same moment cannot deduct the same return twice.
Deleting a return puts the stock back, exactly as deleting a delivery does.

One setting covers both directions. A site where a delivery adds to a count but a return never takes anything off would drift upwards for ever, which is a worse answer than not keeping the count at all.

Supplier bills

Purchase Orders → Bills. What your suppliers say you owe, checked against what you asked for and what actually turned up before anybody agrees to pay it.

The tab opens with the figure that matters: how much is sitting on invoices nobody has agreed to yet, and how many of those have been queried with the supplier. Entering invoices is easy and everybody does it. Noticing that four of them have been queried since March is the thing this screen exists to stop.

Entering one

Two ways in, because businesses buy things both ways:

Against an order. Open the purchase order and press Enter a bill. The button appears once the supplier has confirmed the order (or goods have turned up) - before that, what you are waiting for is their proforma or their acknowledgement, not their invoice. Every line of the order comes across as a tick list, with the ones that have been delivered and not yet invoiced already ticked, at the price on the order.
On its own. Press Enter a bill on the Bills tab and pick the supplier. The electricity does not arrive on a purchase order, and a module that refuses to record it is a module you keep a spreadsheet alongside.

Start by picking their invoice. Drop their PDF in the box at the top of the screen and the invoice number, the invoice date and the total are read off it and put in the boxes for you. It is a guess and it is treated as one: everything it fills in stays editable, a number you have already typed is never overtyped, and a photographed invoice with no text in it simply answers nothing and leaves the boxes as empty as they were. The file itself is filed against the bill the moment you save it.

Then tick what the invoice covers. Every line of the order is listed whether it is on this invoice or not, with Tick everything on the order and Untick them all above the table and a count beside them. A supplier who bills an order in two goes is perfectly ordinary, and ticking three lines of eleven now leaves the other eight sitting there to tick when the second invoice arrives - which is a good deal better than deleting them and typing them back next month. A charge that is not on the order at all is added by hand and removed the same way.

What you type is what is on their paperwork. That is the whole point of the exercise: their figures are allowed to differ from yours, and the module's job is to notice, not to stop you writing down what they actually sent.

Their invoice number is what everybody will quote. One supplier cannot bill you twice under the same number, however they capitalise it - the second attempt is refused, by name.
The invoice date is the date on their paperwork, not today. The due date is worked out from it and the supplier's terms, so an invoice dated the second and opened on the twentieth is due thirty days after the second. Paying it thirty days after the twentieth is how an account goes on stop.
Carriage and Surcharge each have a box of their own. On a bill against an order they start at whatever the order carries, on the first invoice only - once anything on it has been billed, both start at nothing, because a supplier charges them once. Both are taxed at the highest rate on the bill, and both reach the books as lines of their own, so a surcharge never makes the carriage look dearer than it was.
VAT is worked out for you and can be overtyped. Suppliers who round line by line where we round once at the line land a penny or two out on a long invoice, and the figure that matters is the one on the document they would show anybody who asked.
Total, as their invoice states it is the figure printed on their document, read off the file where it could be read. It is never used as a figure - it is checked against what these lines at these prices actually come to, and if the two disagree by more than a couple of pence the screen says so while you are still typing, and the bill carries the disagreement afterwards. A supplier whose lines all check out and whose total does not has charged you for something nobody has itemised.
A charge that is not on the order - a pallet fee, a fuel surcharge, a sundry - is added as its own line. It will be flagged, which is the point.
Category and VAT treatment can be set per line. Where you run the UK Bookkeeping module the categories are your own; where you do not, the boxes are simply not offered, and nothing is lost until the release that takes bills through to the books.

Checking it against the order

Three things get compared, which is why it is called a three-way match: what you ordered, what was delivered, and what has been invoiced. Anything that does not agree is listed in plain words with what it is worth.

A price that has drifted past your tolerance - the order said one figure, the invoice says another.
Being billed for more than turned up, counting anything already invoiced on other bills against the same order.
Being billed for something nothing has been delivered against at all.
A charge that is on no order line.
A total that does not match the lines - what their document says it comes to, against what these lines at these prices come to.

The tolerances are yours, in Settings → Purchase Orders. A price tolerance of 2% is the sensible default - suppliers round, and being told about every three pence would train everybody to stop reading.

None of it stops you approving the invoice. Sometimes the supplier is right, the extra two arrived and are being kept. What matters is that the decision is written down rather than living in somebody's head, so the differences stay on the bill afterwards - but an approved bill says plainly that they were accepted, rather than looking like unfinished work.

A bill with no purchase order behind it says so and nothing more. There is nothing to check it against, and a green tick claiming otherwise would be a lie.

The check is re-run every time you open a bill, so a delivery booked in an hour after the invoice was typed changes the answer straight away. Once somebody has approved it, it stops moving: what was approved is what was true at the time, and a later delivery does not get to tidy it away.

Their invoice, attached

Drop the supplier's own PDF - or a photograph of it - onto the bill. It is kept in your media library under Purchasing → Supplier invoices → the year, so a folder of purchase invoices is something you can browse rather than a heap only this screen can see. PDF, JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 15 MB.

Files are checked for being what they claim to be. They are not scanned for viruses - nothing on this platform is, and saying so plainly beats implying otherwise.

Replacing an attachment leaves the previous file in your library rather than deleting it. It stops being counted as in use, and you decide what happens to it.

Its life

A bill goes draft → approved, with queried as the stop on the way and void as the exit.

Query it with them keeps the question you asked on the bill, so the next person to look can see what was asked and when.
Approve it for payment is the moment somebody says this is what we owe. The figures are fixed at that point - take the approval back, which is recorded, if it needs changing.
Void it for an invoice that should never have been entered. An approved one is voided rather than deleted, so the record survives.
Every move needs purchase-orders.bills. Agreeing to pay somebody is a different job from raising the order or booking the goods in, which is exactly why it is a permission of its own.

In the books is the last stop, and nothing but the books actually taking the entry ever puts a bill there. See below.

Orders that close themselves

Once an order is fully delivered, every line has been invoiced in full, and no supplier still owes you a credit, the order finishes itself off. It saves going round afterwards ticking off orders that finished weeks ago.

Where it lands depends on whether anybody still has reading to do:

Closed, where every invoice on the order has been approved, is in the books, or has been voided. There is nothing left for anybody to look at.
Pending close, where an invoice on it is still in draft or still queried - which is what a supplier filing their own invoice through their link leaves behind. Everything has happened; somebody here has still to agree that what they say you owe is what you owe.

It is checked at each of the moments an order can actually finish: approving or voiding the last invoice, a supplier sending theirs in (through their link or by email), and the last delivery being booked in on an order the invoices got to first. For a supplier who drop-ships, "fully delivered" is the invoice itself - see Suppliers who drop-ship.

It will not settle one with a return still waiting on its money. Closing the order would file away the one screen showing that a supplier owes you.

A Pending close order will not close until every invoice on it has been approved or voided. The Close button says so and stays off until they have been. That is the entire reason the status exists: an order that closed itself on a supplier's say-so would file away an invoice nobody had read. If it turns out they have not invoiced it all after all, Reopened puts it back to Received.

Straight into the books

Where you run the UK Bookkeeping module, approving a supplier's invoice also files it: an expense entry dated to the invoice date, one line per line on the bill, each under the category and VAT treatment you chose, with the supplier's own PDF attached as the evidence behind it. The bill then reads In the books, and it only ever says that because a set of books actually took it.

Some things worth knowing about it:

Nothing is ever recorded twice. Press the button again as often as you like - and do, if the entry landed but the PDF did not.
The VAT that goes across is the VAT printed on their invoice, not the VAT our arithmetic would have preferred. Suppliers who round line by line land a penny out on a long invoice, and the figure in your accounts has to be the one on the document.
The invoice itself is not copied. The books point at the same file in your media library, so there is one copy of it, in one place, and tidying up the library will not quietly delete an accountant's evidence.
An exchange rate is applied once, at the rate on the bill, so a euro invoice arrives in your own money.
Voiding a bill that is in the books takes it back out again. If the VAT return it belongs to has already been filed, or a bank line has been matched to it, it stays put and a reversal goes in the open period instead - which is the only correct way to put a filed return right. That is also why an approval cannot simply be taken back once a bill is in the books: void it, and the books are told.
If the period is already filed, the entry is saved as a draft for you to date yourself rather than being lost, and the bill says so.
Anything the books refuse is written on the bill in their own words, with a Try the books again button beside it. It never stops you approving an invoice: the paperwork is right either way.

Supplier credits go the same way. When a return reaches the credit has arrived, the money comes off your expenses and the VAT off your input tax. It is filed against the purchase invoice where there is exactly one on the order and it is already in the books; otherwise it stands on its own, which is perfectly proper - goods often go back long before the invoice turns up. A supplier who credits less than you claimed is recorded at what actually arrived, spread across the lines. Where they credited particular lines instead, correct the return before marking it credited.

You can switch the whole thing off - see Settings → Purchase Orders → Money → Put approved bills straight into the books. Off is for the owner whose accountant keys purchases in from the bank statement and would rather not have them twice.

Reordering

Purchase Orders → Reorder is the tab that buys things before you run out of them, and it needs the Shop module: it works out what to buy from what you have left, so something has to be keeping count.

Setting a level

A level is two numbers against one product:

Order when it drops to - how few you are willing to have.
Buy this many at a time - usually however the supplier sells the thing. A box of twelve, a pallet of forty.

You can also say who to buy it from. Leave that alone and whoever your catalogue files the product under is used, matched against your own supplier list by name.

Only products something is keeping a count of can have a level - a level on a product nobody is counting is a level that can never be crossed. Picking a product borrows the low-stock level and the supplier already on it as a starting point, both of which you can change.

What it does with them

Every time you open the tab, and once a night, the module works out for each level: what is on the shelf, what is already on its way to you, and whether the two together have dropped to the level. If they have, it buys whole lots of your reorder quantity - as many as it takes to get back above the level, so a product that has been under it for a fortnight is put right in one order rather than nudged along night after night.

What is already on order counts, drafts included. That is what stops the same order being raised every night until fourteen of them are sitting there. It also means a draft nobody ever sends holds the product back for ever - if a draft is not going to happen, cancel it.

Everything that should be bought is grouped into one draft order per supplier, with their terms applied:

Their minimum order value holds the order back rather than padding it out. An order that is short is shown, with how far short it is, and left to grow. Nothing quietly adds four hundred pounds of something nobody asked for to clear a minimum.
Carriage follows their threshold. Over it, carriage is left off; under it, their carriage charge goes on the draft, because they are going to charge it whether or not the paperwork mentions it.

The price on each line is the supplier's own current price list where you keep one and have switched them on, then whatever that supplier last charged you for that product, then the cost price in your catalogue. Two suppliers stocking the same chair at different prices never borrow each other's, at any of the three.

Each line is described the way their price list describes it, too, where the list carries the code - your own shop title is written to sell the thing, not to pick it off their shelf. Your name for it stays on the line underneath on the Orders screen. No list, no code on it, and your own name is used exactly as before.

Anything that cannot be ordered is listed under Waiting on something, each with its own reason: nobody is set to supply it, the supplier is on hold, nothing is counting it, nobody said how many to buy, or the product has left the catalogue.

Who actually presses the button

Nothing is ever sent to a supplier. Every order this raises is a draft, sitting on the Orders tab exactly as if you had typed it, waiting for somebody to read it, change it and send it. Drafts over your approval threshold still need approving, the same as any other.

Raising them overnight is off until you switch it on - Settings → Purchase Orders → Reordering. Off, the tab still works everything out and you press Raise a draft order against a supplier yourself; that button ignores the minimum, because you have looked at it and decided. On, the drafts are waiting for you in the morning.

Buying for a customer order

Somebody has bought three chairs and a desk from you and you buy every one of them in. Open the order under Shop → Orders and there is a Purchasing panel on it.

The panel works out, before you touch anything, what would be raised: one draft purchase order per supplier, what each one comes to, and which lines nobody can buy and why. Press Order this from the suppliers and exactly that is what you get. Nothing is emailed to anybody - they are drafts, sitting on the Orders tab for somebody to read and send.

Everything goes straight to the customer. Each draft is addressed to the delivery address off the customer's order rather than to you, copied across exactly as they typed it. The supplier is buying the parcel a journey, not two.

The company heads the label where the customer wrote one into their delivery address, with the person underneath as the contact - which is how a delivery to a business has to be addressed, and how a post room works out whose it is. A company name given further up the checkout, as a contact detail rather than as part of the address, is left off the label: naming your employer is not the same as asking for the parcel to go there. No company on the address, and the person heads the label as before.

Each line names the service that line has to be sent on, in the words the customer bought - flat-packed, pre-assembled, and the date they were promised. The delivery is then priced the way everything else on the sheet is priced - down the columns. Under the goods figures on that line sit its own quantity, what the service costs for one, and what it comes to across the line, so an order split across two or three services says which line each slice of the carriage came off and a supplier can check it against their own rates without reading a sentence. The money itself still sits on the order as carriage rather than in the line total, which is where this module has always kept delivery money - a line total that swallowed it would disagree with every supplier invoice you ever match against it. A service the customer paid nothing for prints its name and no figures, because there is nothing to buy back. The emailed copy has no columns to use, so it still says the same two figures in words.

The price is what the product costs you, never what the customer paid. Delivery is bundled into the price on the customer's order, so buying at that figure would pay the supplier your customer's carriage twice over. A supplier's own price list is used ahead of your cost price where you keep one - see Pricing orders off them.

Their code, not yours. Each line goes out under the supplier's own code where your product records one (Shop → the product → Product codes → Supplier SKU), and under your SKU where it does not, which is what a supplier who has never given you a code of theirs reads it as anyway.

Sold on sale, bought on sale. Where the shop sold a line under a supplier's clearance code (Shop → the product → Pricing → Sale SKU, beside the sale price), that is the code the order goes out under - ahead of the supplier's ordinary code and ahead of yours. It is fixed the moment the sale is checked out, not read back off the product afterwards, so switching the offer off - or changing the clearance code for the next one - never changes what an order already placed is bought under. The code still needs a price behind it: upload the clearance list as another price list under that supplier (Purchase Orders → Catalogues), with the clearance codes in the SKU column, the same as you would their ordinary list. A sale line with nothing pricing its clearance code is listed under Waiting on something rather than bought at the ordinary cost price - a clearance code invoiced at the standard rate is not a mistake this module makes quietly.

Their small-order surcharge, added for you. Where you have set one up (Purchase Orders → Suppliers → Sale surcharge), a draft that comes to less than their threshold has the surcharge added automatically, as a line of its own counted in the subtotal. The threshold is checked against the goods plus carriage, both net - £290 of goods with £25.90 carriage is a £315.90 order, and clears a £300 threshold with no surcharge at all. It is never folded into what a line costs. Only stock actually bought on sale counts towards it, and only by the category you gave that stock on their price list: three chairs bought on sale add three lots of whatever that supplier charges per Seating unit, and three ordinary chairs on the same order add nothing at all. It never costs you more than it has to - if the surcharge worked out from the categories would push the order past the supplier's threshold, only the difference is added, not the full figure. A draft is still a draft: read it, and change the figure yourself if the supplier's own invoice says something different. When their invoice arrives, the surcharge comes across onto the bill with the rest of the order.

Their words, not yours, either. Where their price list carries the code, the line is described the way THEY describe it on that list. Your shop listing title is your own invention - written to sell the thing to a customer, and no help at all to somebody picking it off a shelf in their warehouse. Your name for it stays on the line underneath on the Orders screen, and is what receiving and the reports go on matching against, so nothing is lost. No price list, or a list that does not name that code, and your own name is used exactly as before.

Pressing it twice does not order twice. The panel lists what has already been raised for that order and says so instead. Cancel those first if you genuinely want to start again - a cancelled purchase order is a decision to buy it differently, so it never blocks a second attempt. A customer order that has been cancelled or refunded is not bought for at all.

Lines that cannot be bought are listed underneath with a sentence each: nothing says who supplies it, nobody on your supplier list is called that, the supplier is on hold or switched off, the product has left the catalogue, or a line sold on sale has no price for its clearance code. Nothing is dropped in silence, and nothing stops the rest of the order being raised.

Raising them needs purchase-orders.create, and the panel is only there at all for somebody who can see purchasing.

Having it drafted the moment they pay

Settings → Purchase Orders → Buying for customer orders. Off until you switch it on, and off is how every site starts.

With it on, the drafts are typed for you the instant the money lands - the same drafts the button would have made, one per supplier, going straight to the customer's address, priced the same way. It makes no difference how they paid: card, PayPal, Square, bank transfer you cleared by hand yourself, or an order that came to nothing and needed no payment at all.

Replacement orders are deliberately left alone. They are there to put something right, not to send the buying team round the loop again, so they do not show the customer-order buying panel, make drafts by themselves, or appear in the overnight "paid but not bought" sweep.

It drafts and it stops - unless you have also asked for the drafts to be sent by themselves (below), supplier by supplier. Otherwise nothing is approved, nothing is sent, no supplier hears a word. What is being automated is the typing, not the buying - a draft sitting on the Orders tab commits you to nothing, and somebody still reads it and presses Send. Drafts over your approval threshold still need approving, exactly as they would if you had typed them.

You are told when something could not be bought, and only then. A run nobody started has nobody watching it, so if a line could not be matched to a supplier - or the whole order could not be - an email says which one and why. When everything was bought you hear nothing, because a machine that writes every morning to say it is fine is a machine nobody reads by the second week. The drafts are on the Orders tab either way, and the customer order's own Purchasing panel says which of them appeared by themselves.

Nothing gets missed if the till hiccups. If the payment came in while the site was mid-deploy, or you switched this on the day after a busy weekend, the overnight run picks up anything paid in the last week that never had a purchase order raised against it. Anything older than a week is left alone: switching this on is not a decision to go back through your history and buy it all again.

A refund after the fact is flagged, not undone. A customer order cancelled or refunded once its purchase orders were already drafted shows a warning on the order, because nobody chose to raise those and nobody is watching them. It is left for you to sort out: the goods may already be on their way, and that is a conversation with the supplier rather than something to cancel behind your own back. An order that is already cancelled or refunded is never bought for in the first place.

Having those drafts sent by themselves

Settings → Purchase Orders → Sending those drafts by themselves, and then Suppliers → (a supplier) → Send their automatic drafts by themselves. Both are off until you switch them on, and both have to be on: the first is the master switch, the second says which suppliers it applies to.

With them on, a draft made when a customer pays is emailed to its supplier once a wait is up - an hour unless you change it - exactly as if you had pressed Send: the same email, the same link for the supplier, the same entry in the order's history. The check runs every half hour, so in practice it goes between one hour and an hour and a half after the customer paid. Where a name would go under Authorised by on the purchase order, it says Sent automatically, because that is what happened. The order screen and the orders download from the Reports tab say the same.

Read this before you tick a supplier. On the first live site to use automatic drafting, most of the drafts had their prices changed by hand before they were sent - by anything from 2% to a quarter. A draft that is usually wrong should not go out by itself. So each supplier shows its record beside the switch: "Of the last 10 automatic drafts to this supplier, 7 were changed before they were sent." That number is the thing to watch. It is information, not a lock - you decide - but if it is not close to nought, the drafts are not ready to send themselves.

A person touching it takes it out of the queue for good. While a draft is waiting, the customer order's Purchasing panel and the order itself say "Sends automatically at 14:30 unless you open it and change it", in your own time zone. Save any change to it - an edit, putting it on hold, submitting it for approval, changing its terms - and it will not be sent by itself: a person changed it, so a person sends it, and the order says who. Pressing Send yourself before the time is up works exactly as it always has. The one moment you cannot do either is the minute it is actually being sent: you are told "This draft is being sent automatically right now. Look again in a minute", and when you do, it has gone - so nothing ever reaches the supplier twice, or reaches them with one version while the screen shows another.

What it will not send. Each of these leaves the draft as a draft, says why on the order, and sends you one email about it (never one every half hour):

the master switch or the supplier's switch was turned off during the wait;
the customer order was cancelled or refunded during the wait, in full or in part, or is anywhere other than paid and going ahead - on hold, say, or its payment failed;
the order is over your approval threshold, as your settings stand at the moment it would go - nothing is ever approved by itself;
the supplier has no email address;
anything on the customer order could not be drafted at all;
a line with no price, or - with suppliers' price lists switched on - a line whose price is not exactly what that supplier's current list says, or that the list marks discontinued;
an order already sent once: a change to it is never sent by itself;
the email would not go after three tries, half an hour apart. The email you get quotes what the mail server said.

And once an email has gone it is never sent again by itself. If the site could not note it on the order afterwards, or the check stopped part way through, the draft says so and asks you to check before sending it yourself.

It never turns itself off. If a supplier's proforma or invoice arrives by email disagreeing with the order, the paperwork email says so and adds that their drafts are being sent by themselves. The switch stays where you put it: whether to turn it off is your decision, and that email is the moment to make it.

When they bought a set

If the customer bought a product that is made up of other products (see "Products made up of other products" on the Shop page), you do not buy the set. The panel shows one line for each part instead: that part's own SKU, supplier and cost, and the number you need, which is the number of sets times the number of that part in one. So three chairs of one seat and two bases becomes three seats and six bases, each going on the draft for whoever supplies it, and a part with no supplier is listed as one nobody can buy, like any other line.

If the customer chose a delivery service, its name goes on every part, and its cost is charged once rather than once per part.

Tracking is read the other way round. A parcel holding the seat is not news that a chair has gone, so the customer's order only says a set has been sent once every part of it has, even if the parts come from different suppliers in different parcels.

The set is read as it is defined when the parcel arrives. If you change what a set is made of after the order has been raised, that applies to the tracking too.

Suppliers' price lists

Purchase Orders → Catalogues is where a supplier's own catalogue lives, so an order can be drafted at what they are charging today rather than at whatever was typed into a product when it was created.

It needs nothing else installed. A supplier publishes a price list whether or not you sell anything online, and the shop only comes into it for two conveniences, both of which say so on the screen when it is not there.

Putting a list on file

A list belongs to one supplier and has a name - whatever they call it. "Seating 2026", "Trade price list", "Spring". You can also record where it lives, and when it starts applying.

If you have the Shop module, your shop already keeps a list of each supplier's catalogues, and you can simply pick one of those rather than typing the address again. Doing that brings the address across and remembers which one it was, so the same link is not kept in two places drifting apart - and it is what lets Import go and read the list rather than asking you for a file.

The prices on it are says what the numbers in the list mean:

What you pay - a trade list, already net. This is how every list behaves unless you say otherwise.
Retail, less your discount - the supplier prints what a customer would pay, and your price is that less the percentage on their supplier record. The discount comes off every price as the list is imported, so what ends up on file, and on a purchase order, is what you actually pay. If there is no discount recorded against that supplier, nothing comes off and the import says so rather than pretending.

Importing the prices

Import reads the list straight from the address on it. There is nothing to download and nothing to upload: press it, read what it would change, and say yes. It only ever happens when you press the button - nothing here goes off and fetches anything on a schedule, or in the background, or overnight.

A Google Sheet has to be shared so that anyone with the link can view it, otherwise all we get back is Google's sign-in page and the import says exactly that. Which tab the link is on is respected, so a workbook with a tab per range imports the one you linked to.

Upload instead is there for everything else: a spreadsheet emailed to you, a list behind a login, a supplier with no link at all. Save it as a CSV and choose the file. Very large files are the one thing to watch: a spreadsheet over about four megabytes cannot be sent up from a browser, and it says so and asks you to put it somewhere with an address instead, where the reading happens on the server and the file never goes near your browser at all.

A big sheet is fine from a link. Suppliers rarely send a price list on its own - the same sheet usually carries the photography captions, the body copy and eighty columns of specification alongside, and thirty megabytes of that is an ordinary export rather than a mistake. Only the columns a price list needs are read out of it, so size is not the problem it sounds like: anything up to about sixty megabytes imports, and a very large one takes a few seconds longer to come down. Past that, or if it is still arriving after forty seconds, you are told - and a sheet with just the codes and the prices on it will go through in moments.

Either way the same reading applies. A column of codes and a column of prices is enough, and the headers can say whatever they already say - "Supplier SKU", "Product code", "Code", "Trade price", "Net price", "RRP" and a good many others are all understood. Where a list carries both a trade price and a retail one, the trade price is the one taken.

Pack size, minimum order quantity, lead time, discount group, category and a discontinued column are all read as well, when they are there. Category is whatever the supplier's own sheet calls the kind of thing a line is - "Seating", "Furniture", a range name - and it is the one thing here that does more than sit on the screen: it is what a supplier's sale surcharge prices against.

The headings do not have to be on the first line. Most suppliers' spreadsheets are exports from something else, and exports arrive with a blank row, a title, a row of merged group headings, and only then the columns. The first fifteen rows are looked at and the one that reads like a header row is the one used.

When it reads the wrong column

Some things cannot be guessed. A sheet carrying both a "SKU" and a "Catalogue Code" gives no clue which of them goes on a purchase order, because that is a fact about your supplier rather than about the file. A range sheet with eighty-nine columns will have several that could plausibly be a price.

So under every preview there is Say which column is which, which opens itself when the reading has plainly gone wrong. Pick the row the headings are on, then point each thing - their product code, the description, the price, pack size, smallest order, lead time, discount group, category, no-longer-sold - at the column it actually lives in, or at Not in this file where they simply do not send it. Press Read it again like this and the preview is worked out afresh.

What you pick is kept on that list, so next month's import reads itself. It is kept by heading as well as by position, so a supplier who inserts a column, or adds a row above their headings, does not quietly shift everything along by one. Work it out for me forgets the mapping and goes back to reading the headings.

You are shown what the list would do before anything happens. Where it was read from, what discount came off it, how many prices are in it, which column was read as what, and - comparing it against the list already on file - what is new, what has gone, what has moved price, what they have stopped selling, and what has come back under a new code. That last one is why the comparison exists: a supplier who reissues the same chair under a new number leaves everything you sell under the old one quietly unbuyable, and nothing else on your site would ever tell you.

Then you press the button, or you do not.

Two things are worth knowing:

An import replaces the list. A price list is a statement about a whole range on the day it was published, so anything on file that is not in the file goes. Merging would keep last year's codes alive for ever, which is the exact thing this is here to prevent.
A file that reads as nothing is refused. Every price a supplier has disappearing because somebody uploaded the wrong sheet is not the sort of thing a confirmation box makes acceptable.
What you agreed to is what you get. A list fetched from a link is read again when you press the button, and checked against the version you were shown. If the supplier has edited their sheet while you were reading the comparison, nothing is imported and you are handed the new comparison to look at instead.

Rows that cannot be read - no code, a price that says "POA", a code in there twice at two different prices - are counted and the first twenty listed with the row number the spreadsheet shows, and the rest of the file still imports. Nothing is dropped in silence. If most of the file is in that list, the columns are pointing at the wrong things and the picker is the place to fix it.

Pricing orders off them

This is off until you switch it on - Settings → Purchase Orders → Suppliers' price lists. You can get lists on file and ready either way; nothing is priced off them until you say so.

With it on, an order line for a code one of that supplier's lists names is drafted at their price, and the line says which list it came from. Everything else carries on exactly as before: a code no list names is priced at what the product says it costs. That goes for lines you pick yourself, lines the reorder job suggests, and the purchase orders raised straight off a customer order.

Where a supplier has two lists carrying the same code, the one imported most recently wins. That is the list somebody has just been handed.

Checking your shop against their list

Check the shop against a supplier's list takes every product your shop files under that supplier and matches its code against everything on their current lists. It changes nothing at all; it tells you three things, each with a sentence you can act on:

Codes their list does not name - renumbered, or the list needs importing again.
Codes they have stopped selling and you are still selling.
Prices that have drifted apart by more than the difference you have said you can live with on an invoice.

Codes on their lists that you do not sell are counted, not listed. A supplier's range is always bigger than yours, and four thousand lines saying so helps nobody.

Reports

Purchase Orders → Reports answers the five questions a purchasing person actually asks, and it needs nothing else installed to answer them. Everything on it is worked out the moment you open it, so a delivery booked in ten minutes ago has already changed the answer - there is no overnight figure sitting there going stale.

One currency. Every figure on the page is in the currency you keep your books in. An order placed in euros is converted at the rate it was raised at, and a supplier's invoice at the rate on the invoice. So the committed figure is an expectation and the spend figure is what you were actually billed, which is the honest way round.

Committed and not yet received

What you have promised suppliers and not had, by supplier. Sent orders only - an approved order still sitting in the tray is a decision, not a commitment: nobody outside the building knows about it, and nothing would turn up if everybody went home. Anything cancelled or closed is off it, and so is anything you have already had.

Late

Every order past its date with something still owing, worst first, with what it is worth and how many days it has been. The date it is judged against is the one the supplier gave you, falling back to the date you asked for. An order with neither has no date to be late against, which is a gap in your paperwork rather than a late delivery, and it says so.

Beside each one is what chasing has done about it, or why it has not.

Arrived, not invoiced - and invoiced, not arrived

The two halves of the same question, and between them the reason a purchasing system is worth keeping.

Arrived, not invoiced is what you are going to be billed for and have not been. Anything you have sent back is taken off first - the supplier is not going to invoice you for that. This is the figure an accountant asks for at a year end.
Invoiced, not arrived is a supplier billing you for something nobody has seen. Worth a telephone call rather than a payment.

Both are worked out from the same quantities the order screen shows, so they can never disagree with it. Both leave cancelled orders out and keep closed ones in: closing an order is somebody saying the goods business is finished, which says nothing at all about whether the invoice ever turned up.

Spend

Choose a window - the last twelve months to start with - and the module shows what you have spent, three ways: by supplier, month by month, and by expense category.

Spend is what somebody has agreed to pay: invoices you have approved, and ones already in your books. A draft nobody has looked at and a queried one nobody has settled are not spend yet, and a void one never was. Credits from returns come off it.

All of it excludes VAT, which is the figure worth comparing one supplier against another and the only one the category breakdown can produce. The category breakdown comes off the invoice lines, so carriage and any surcharge - which hang off the invoice rather than off any line - are not in it; that is why it can come to a little less than the supplier table above it.

Category names come from UK Bookkeeping. Without it the column shows whatever was typed on the lines, and says so.

Chasing a late supplier

Switch chasing on in settings and a supplier whose order is late gets a short note asking where it has got to - once it is however many days late you said, and then on the repeat you said. Set the repeat to zero and they are asked exactly once, which is what most people want and what nobody expects a "repeat every 0 days" box to mean, so it is worth saying out loud.

Nothing is changed by a chase. It is a question: the order keeps its status, its dates and its lines, and all that is written is a line in its history saying somebody asked. If you have the supplier link switched on, the note carries a fresh one, so they can tell you the new date rather than write back.

Some things stop a chase, and each says which:

The order is not out with a supplier - a draft, or one awaiting approval.
Everything on it has arrived.
It is on hold. Putting an order on hold is you saying leave it alone, and a job that emails the supplier anyway has ignored the only instruction it was given.
Nobody put a date on it.
The supplier has no email address on file.

You can send one yourself from this tab whether or not chasing is switched on, and whether or not the repeat interval has run - either Chase on a single order, or the button that does everything currently due. The one thing no button can supply is an email address.

A chase is only recorded once it has actually gone. A chase written down for one that bounced is exactly what would stop the next one being sent.

Taking it away with you

Four spreadsheets, over the same dates as the spend window:

File	One row per
Orders	Purchase order, with its totals, dates and terms.
Order lines	Line, with what was ordered, received, invoiced, returned and still outstanding.
Deliveries	Line of a delivery: what turned up, what was rejected and why.
Supplier invoices	Invoice, with its match, its variances and whether their own PDF is attached.

Amounts go out as plain numbers with the currency in a column of its own, so a spreadsheet adds them up rather than treating them as text. A file stops at twenty thousand rows.

The tile on your dashboard

Your admin dashboard gains a Purchasing tile for anybody with permission to see the section: how many orders are out with suppliers, what they are worth, how many are late, and how many supplier invoices are waiting to be checked. It reads off exactly the same figures as this tab, so the two cannot tell you different things.

The order itself

Every purchase order has a document: the sheet the supplier reads, files and quotes back at you. You design it, once, and every order is printed from it.

Appearance → Layouts → Purchase Orders → Purchase order document. Three starting points come with the module:

Standard purchase order - published for you the moment the module is installed, so there is never a moment where an order will not print. Heading, both addresses, where the goods are going, the lines, the money and your terms.
Designed purchase order - the same order laid out properly: a rule in your own colour under the heading, the delivery address in a panel, a banded line table, and the instruction to quote your order number where nobody can miss it.
Just the order - heading, supplier, delivery address, lines. For a business that agrees its terms once and would rather not reprint them on every sheet.

The blocks

Drag them about, drop the ones you do not want, and every one of them has its own colours, sizes and wording:

Block	What it prints
Heading	The word "Purchase order", your order number, the dates, your account number with them, and the revision flag on an amended order.
Who it is between	Their details and yours, side by side.
From / To	The same two, one at a time, for a layout that wants them in different places or at different sizes.
Deliver to	Where the goods actually go - which on a drop-shipped order is neither address, and is the single most misread line on a purchase order. The country is left off unless you switch it on, because "GB" under every postcode is noise on a sheet going four miles up the road; switch it on and it prints properly spelled out ("France", not "FR").
Lines	What you are buying: description, their code, quantity, unit cost, line total. Under the description sits anything the supplier has to act on differently - the delivery service and what it costs, your own code, the date wanted, a discount. Carriage, surcharge and an order discount follow the goods as lines of their own, each with its own wording, and carriage or surcharge can be printed at nothing where "carriage paid" is the deal.
Totals	Subtotal (everything above it, carriage and surcharge included), VAT and the order total, with the currency beside it.
Terms	Your standing terms from settings, plus this order's payment and delivery terms.
Notes	Whatever was typed on the order for the supplier. Notes for you never appear here and cannot be made to.
Authorised by	Who raised it, who approved it, and a line to sign if you print them out.
Notice panel, Document style, Divider	A sentence in a panel, the document's colours and spacing in one place, and a rule.

The small print at the foot of every page is not on this list, deliberately. That comes from the one Document footer layout shared by everything your site prints, so your registration line is designed once and appears on the purchase order, the invoice, the credit note and the quote alike. See Appearance and design.

The notice panel and the terms accept placeholders - {{ORDER_NUMBER}}, {{REQUIRED_BY}}, {{TOTAL}} and a dozen more, listed under the box you type them into. A placeholder with nothing behind it disappears rather than printing itself.

Paper and margins

With nothing selected in the editor, the left panel shows the page settings: the paper size, the margins and the print scale. They are the same settings the invoice and the quote use, so paperwork that ends up in the same folder is set on the same sheet.

Sending it

Open an order and the bar at the top has all three:

View document opens the order exactly as it prints.
Download PDF, under More, saves it.
Email it to the supplier sends it, with the PDF attached, to the address on the supplier record - copying in whatever else that record lists.

The email goes first and the order is only marked as sent once it actually has. If it will not go you are told why, in the words the mail service gave, and the order stays where it was. An order marked "Sent" that nobody ever received is how a business ends up waiting six weeks for goods it never ordered.

Anything typed into the note box - Add a note, in the bar - travels with it, and is recorded against the order either way.

Once an order has gone, the button becomes Email it again and stops being the solid one. A prominent "send" on an order sent ten minutes ago is how a supplier gets the same order twice.

If your site has no email set up, or the supplier has no email address on file, you are told so plainly - and the PDF is still there to attach to your own email by hand. Marking an order as sent without emailing it is still there too, under More: plenty of orders go by phone or over a trade counter.

An order over your approval threshold cannot be emailed until it has been approved. That holds whichever button you press.

Sending an order is what approves it, where nobody already has. An order under your threshold never waits for approval, so nobody ever presses Approve on it - but somebody read it and sent it, which is the same decision made with a different button. Whoever sends it (by email, or by marking it as sent) is recorded as its approver, with the date, and their name prints under Authorised by on the copy the supplier receives. The history gets a line of its own saying so. An order that did go through approval keeps the name of whoever approved it. Orders sent before this existed are given their sender as approver the next time the module updates.

Changing an order they already have

Edit an order that has gone out and Cactus asks one question: what has changed. Answer it and:

The version the supplier is holding is filed as a revision, exactly as it was printed, and never changes again.
The live order moves on to Rev 2, Rev 3 and so on, and the document prints that revision number where nobody can miss it.
Email it again emails them the replacement, on the amendment wording rather than the original.

Past revisions are listed on the order with who made each change, when, and why.

Amending is possible while the supplier can still act on it - sent, acknowledged, part received, on hold. An order that is finished with - fully received, closed or cancelled - is history, and raising a fresh one is the honest thing to do.

The supplier's own link

Switch the supplier link on in settings and every order you email carries a link of its own. It opens that one order, and nothing else on your site.

What the supplier sees is a panel of everything they can tell you, and under it the order exactly as it prints. The panel is above the order, not below it, which sounds like a detail until you have watched somebody scroll past forty lines of desks looking for the button that says yes.

Anything you want that supplier to read is at the very top. Each supplier record has A message on their own order page (Suppliers → edit a supplier), and whatever you write there sits above everything else on every link you send them: quote the account number, ring before delivering, no pallets after three. It is theirs alone - it appears nowhere on the order document, nowhere on a packing slip and in no email, and it is read fresh each time, so changing it changes what they see on orders you sent last month as well. Leave it empty and the page carries no such box. It is not the Notes field further down that form, which stays firmly on your side of the desk.

In the panel they can:

download the order as a PDF - the same file you would email them, printed off the same layout, for their own system;
send you their proforma, on an order to a supplier you pay up front (see Suppliers who want paying first);
accept it - "yes, we can supply this" - and attach their own order acknowledgement while they are there, which files their PDF against the order and confirms it in one press. Attaching one is optional; they can simply confirm;
give you a date line by line, if what you asked for is not going to happen. A supplier sending an order in three drops has three answers, and one box for the lot was never the truth;
say something is short, line by line, with how many they cannot send at all;
tell you what they have actually sent, with a tracking number and their own tracking link, and take away a packing slip for that delivery (see What they have sent, and the packing slip). The packing slip opens by itself the moment they have told you - telling you what has gone and printing the paper that goes in the box are one job in a warehouse, and a screen that says "it is ready under Packing slips" is asking somebody holding a roll of tape to go and find a button;
send you their VAT invoice, ticking off what it covers, where you have switched that on (see Letting suppliers invoice you through the link);
leave a message about anything else - about the whole order, or about the particular lines they pick.

Every line form works the same way: tick the line first, then answer for it. A ten-line order used to open with ten empty boxes, which reads as ten questions and gets two of them filled in wrong. Now the lines are a tick list, and the box appears on the one they have ticked - a date on Report a delay, a quantity on Report out of stock, a quantity on Record a despatch. The despatch box arrives already holding everything still owed on that line, because a whole pallet is the usual answer; they can overtype it for a part load, and We are sending all of it still ticks the lot in one press. The out-of-stock box starts empty on purpose - "all of it" is not something anybody should be able to report by accident.

Neither quantity box will take more than the line has left. Type four against a line with two still to come and the box turns red, says why, and the send button goes dead until it is sorted - the same answer whether they are reporting a shortage or a despatch, and the same answer if something posts round the page entirely. Nothing is quietly trimmed to fit: a form that takes "ten", files "four" and says thank you has told the supplier something untrue, and the first anybody hears of it is a delivery that does not match. A line they have already sent in full drops off the out-of-stock list, because there is none of it left to be short of - and where a line is part sent, what is left is what they are held to.

Under each box it says what they have just told you - "1 of 4 out of stock", "2 of 4 being sent". Two of the forms look near enough identical from a phone in a yard, and a bare box holding "1" does not say which of the two it is.

Where they leave the reference box empty, their number is read off the file they sent - the same reading described in Filing their paperwork yourself, and just as correctable from your side afterwards. It is one less thing to copy out of a PDF they have already sent you, which is a box most suppliers skip.

Their proforma and their acknowledgement go in a big box they can drop a file onto. Drag the PDF from wherever they have it open and let go anywhere on the box; the ordinary Choose file button sits in the middle of it for everybody else, and the name of the file they picked appears underneath so they can see they picked the right one. The old arrangement was a file button the width of a thumbnail, which in a warehouse on a phone is a target nobody finds.

Purchase History at the bottom of the panel is the whole story of that order, both ways round and newest first: the order going out, any changed version of it, reminders you sent, their proforma arriving and you paying it, what they told you, what they despatched, and every delivery you booked in. Every line says which side it came from before it says anything else - From us or From you - because "we paid your proforma" and "you sent your proforma" are usually a day apart and read as each other otherwise. It carries nothing internal: no reasons you cancelled or closed anything, no payment reference, no notes from your side of the desk.

None of it changes your order. Accepting it marks the order as acknowledged; a despatch is filed as a despatch and books nothing in. A date or a shortage is written down against the order for you to act on - your prices, your quantities and your terms are exactly where you left them. A purchase order somebody else can edit is not a purchase order.

Three of those are switches in settings: letting suppliers send you files, letting them say what they have sent, and letting them invoice you. The first two are on to begin with; the third is not - see below. Files arriving through the link are the one place on your site where somebody with no account can put something on it, so they are checked for what they really are rather than what they are called, capped in size, and never run - and if that is still one door too many, the page tells them to email it instead.

Letting suppliers invoice you through the link

Off until you turn it on, in Settings → Purchase Orders, and it is the one switch on that page worth thinking hardest about. Everything else a supplier can do through their link is a message or a document. This one writes down what you owe them.

With it on, Send your invoice appears on their panel. They attach their VAT invoice and tick which lines it covers - This invoice covers all of it does the lot in one press - and that is very nearly all they have to do. The invoice number, the invoice date and the total are read off the file they sent, the same reading described in Filing their paperwork yourself; the three boxes are there for the day it cannot be read, and every one of them is optional.

What arrives at your end is a draft bill with their invoice attached, waiting on the Bills tab exactly as one you typed yourself would be. What it is not:

It is not approved, and nothing about it can approve itself. Approving is still a person here with the bills permission.
It never reaches your books. An entry in your accounts on a supplier's unattended say-so is precisely the thing this will not do. The books hear about it when you approve it, and not before.
The prices are not theirs. Every line is priced at what your order said, at the rate your order said. There is no box on their form for a unit price, because a form that let a supplier retype your prices would be a form for repricing an order after the fact. The one figure of theirs that is recorded is the total printed on their own document, which is checked against what those lines come to and flagged where the two disagree.
They cannot invoice for more than the order says. Type four against a line with two left to invoice and the box turns red and the send button goes dead, the same as every other quantity on that page. A supplier who really has over-invoiced you emails it, and you enter it at this end, where it is flagged in the ordinary way.
They cannot send the same invoice number twice. The second attempt is refused, by name.

Once they have invoiced everything on a delivered order it goes to Pending close, which is your cue to read the invoices and close it. It will not close until you have approved or voided every one of them.

You are emailed when one arrives, the same as anything else they say.

Handling what they say

Open the order and there is a What the supplier said card, newest first. A message they sent about particular lines names them first - About Oak desk 1600mm; Pedestal: these two are on back order - so whoever reads it knows whether it is theirs to answer without opening the order to find out. Where they have offered dates there is a Use these 3 dates button, which moves each of those lines and pulls the order's own expected date out to the last of them, and records that you did. An older reply that offered one date for the whole order still has its own Use 2026-05-04 button, and always will.

A shortage has no such button, on purpose. Cutting a line down is a change to an order they are holding a copy of, so it goes the proper way round: amend the order and send them the replacement, or use Give up on the rest on the line where that is really what has happened.

You are emailed each time a supplier says something, so nothing waits for somebody to happen to open the screen. That email goes to the purchasing address in Who is buying, or to your shop's contact address where you have not filled that in.

Making and stopping links

The The supplier's link card on each order lists every link ever made for it: when, by whom, how long it lasts, and how many times it has been opened.

Make a link for the supplier, under More at the top of the order, makes another one and takes you straight to it, for the day somebody at the supplier cannot find the email. An order has to have been sent first - a link to a draft is a link to prices nobody has agreed yet.
Stop it ends one link. Stop every link ends the lot, for the day one is forwarded to the wrong supplier.
Links expire on their own after however many days you set, sixty by default.

A link is shown once, at the moment it is made. It is not kept anywhere afterwards, only a fingerprint of it, so nobody - including us - can look it up again. If it is lost, make another one and stop the old one. That is a small inconvenience in exchange for a stolen backup carrying nothing that opens anything.

Nothing about the supplier's page is guessable, either: the number in the address is no use without the link, and a link made for one order will not open the next one along.

The returns note

The second document the module prints, designed exactly the way the order is: Appearance → Layouts → Purchase Orders → Returns note. Two starting points come with it.

Standard returns note - published for you the moment the module is installed, so a return will always print. Heading, both addresses, why the goods are going back, what is in the box and what you expect to be credited.
Designed returns note - the same note in your own accent colour, with the reason in a panel where nobody can miss it and the amount you are owed spelled out at the top.

Its blocks are its own - a heading that always carries the order number, the two addresses, the reason, the lines, the credit due, notes and terms, and a notice panel - but the Document style and Divider blocks are the same ones the order uses. Design your purchasing paperwork once and you have designed both.

Two small things worth knowing:

The order number cannot be hidden. A return a supplier cannot file against an order is a box on their dock and a mystery.
The credit prints as a positive figure with a label saying what it is. A minus sign under a heading that already says "returns note" only invites the question of which way round it is meant.

What they have sent, and the packing slip

A supplier who ships an order in three lorries used to send you three emails. Now they tell the page.

In the Record a despatch block on their link they tick what has gone - each tick filling the quantity box with whatever is still owed on that line - put the date it left them, and add the carrier, a tracking number and a tracking link if there are any. Each of those is a despatch, numbered in its own series (DSP-00007 by default), and the moment it is filed they get a packing slip to download and put in the box.

Only what is genuinely left to send is offered. Two browser tabs cannot despatch the same pallet twice, and a quantity typed larger than what is outstanding is refused with a plain explanation rather than quietly cut down to what fits.
The tracking link is theirs to give you. A supplier who has a page of their own showing where the pallet is can paste it in, and typing palletways.example/track/882 without the https:// is fine - it is tidied up for them. It has to be an ordinary web address, and anything else is turned away.
Every despatch they have filed stays listed on their page with its own Download the packing slip link, so the file can be fetched again next week without anybody asking you for it.
On your side, the order grows a What the supplier has sent card: every despatch, what was on it, the carrier and tracking (as a link where they gave you one), and the same packing slip to download. A link with no number beside it still shows up, as Track this delivery.

The tracking link is for your side of the desk only. It never prints on the packing slip and is never shown to whoever the goods are going to.

When the supplier will not use the link

Plenty of them will not. They email, or they ring, and somebody here writes it down.

Record a despatch, under More at the top of the order, opens a form on that same card with what is still to send, a box per line, the date it left them, the carrier, the tracking number and a tracking link. Save it and you get the same row, the same number and the same packing slip - the table simply says Entered here rather than Told to us by the supplier, so you can always tell which is which. A despatch read off an email (see Delivery tracking from email) says From an email with the tracking, and shows the delivery day and slot where the email gave them.

Two things it does differently from the supplier's own page, both on purpose:

It works on an order already marked received, where theirs does not. Writing up last week's paperwork is an ordinary thing to be doing; a supplier confirming a despatch against an order you have finished with is not.
Anything over what is still to send is trimmed to it. A supplier who sends more than you ordered is an over-delivery to flag when it turns up (see More than you ordered), not a packing slip claiming goods that were never on the order. The form says so, and tells you if it had to trim anything.

Remove takes a despatch back off, whichever way it was filed, for the day somebody types the wrong quantity or the supplier files the same pallet twice. It unpicks nothing else: goods-in keeps its own records and this does not touch them. The packing slip printed off it stops working, which is right - a slip for a delivery that was never made is a sheet nobody should be able to fetch - though anybody already holding the PDF keeps it, as they would with any file.

Either purchase-orders.receive or purchase-orders.create can do both. On a small site that is the same person; on a larger one it could be either desk, and a note about goods coming is not a change to what was ordered.

A despatch is not a delivery. It books nothing in, counts nothing, moves no stock and changes no status. It is the supplier saying a pallet left them on Tuesday; Deliveries is still somebody here saying it turned up and counting it. The two arrive days apart and the day they are merged is the day a stock count moves because a supplier pressed a button.

The packing slip

The third document the module prints, designed exactly the way the order is: Appearance → Layouts → Purchase Orders → Packing slip. Two starting points come with it, and the standard one is published for you so a slip will always print.

Its blocks are its own - a heading carrying the despatch number and the order number, your own name and address, where the box is going, what is in it against what was ordered, how it travelled, and notes - while the Document style and Divider blocks are the same ones the order and the returns note use. Design your purchasing paperwork once and you have designed all three.

Two things about this document are not negotiable, and they are the whole reason it exists as a document of its own:

There is no money on it. Not a unit cost, not a line total, not an order total. There is no field to print one from and no switch to turn one on. On an order you have drop-shipped, the person opening that box is your customer, and what your supplier charged you for it is between you and your supplier.
Your supplier is not named on it. Your name is at the top, because that is who your customer bought from.

It also says when there is more to come. A box holding eight of the twelve somebody ordered, with nothing on the paperwork to say so, is the single most common reason a delivery gets reported as wrong when it is not - so the slip prints both figures and a line saying the rest is following.

The wording is yours: Settings → Purchase Orders → Wording on a packing slip, including what somebody should do if the box is short or damaged.

Settings

Settings → Purchase Orders.

Numbering - the prefix on order, goods-received, returns and despatch numbers. Despatches have a series of their own because what left the supplier and what you booked in are different things. Changing a prefix only affects what comes next; everything already raised keeps the number it was given.
Approvals - whether, and over what.
Checking what arrives - how much over-delivery you will accept without a flag, and how far a supplier's invoice may drift from your order on price and on quantity before it is queried. All three are in use.
Add goods to stock when they arrive - off by default, and greyed out entirely on a site with nothing keeping stock counts. It covers both directions: deliveries add, returns take off. See Checking goods in.
Where goods normally go - your own address, filled in once.
Money - the currency you keep your books in. Suppliers may of course bill you in theirs; each order and each bill carries its own currency and its own exchange rate. Also the expense category a bill line falls back to when nobody picked one, and Put approved bills straight into the books, which is on where you run UK Bookkeeping and greyed out where you do not.
Who is buying - your own name, address, contact details, VAT number and company number, as they print at the top of an order. Leave a box empty and, where you run the Shop module, whatever is on your invoices is used instead - there is no need to type your VAT number twice. Also the start of the filename a saved PDF gets.
Wording on the order - the heading, the opening line, your terms, and a footer note. These are frozen onto an order the first time it is sent, so re-wording your terms next March does not quietly re-word an order somebody accepted last year. To be rid of the opening line ("Please supply the following, quoting our order number on all paperwork.") either clear that box, which drops it everywhere, or turn it off on the layout that prints it - Document layout → the Heading block → Opening line → No - which leaves the wording where it is for a layout that does want it. The "Just the order" starter layout ships with it off already.
Wording on a returns note - its own heading, opening line and terms, plus the start of the filename a saved note gets. It has its own wording because "please supply the following" on a note about goods going back is quite the mixed message.
Wording on a packing slip - the heading, the opening line, and what somebody should do if the box is short or damaged, plus the start of the filename a saved slip gets. Its own wording again, because this one goes in the box and is read by your customer rather than by your supplier.
Reordering - whether draft orders are raised overnight from your reorder levels. Off by default, and greyed out on a site with no catalogue. See Reordering.
Buying for customer orders - whether a paid customer order drafts its purchase orders by itself. Off by default, and greyed out on a site with no shop. It drafts and stops; nothing is ever sent to a supplier without somebody sending it. See Having it drafted the moment they pay.
Supplier paperwork by email and Delivery tracking by email - only on a site running Unified Inbox. Each off by default, each its own switch. See Supplier paperwork from email and Delivery tracking from email.
Suppliers' price lists - whether an order line is priced off a supplier's own list where one names the code. Off by default. You can keep lists on file either way; this is the switch that lets them price anything. See Suppliers' price lists.
Where this email goes - only on a site running Unified Inbox, and only for somebody who may manage it. Two questions, either useful on its own. Send these from picks which of your inboxes your purchase order emails leave as, so a supplier's reply lands with the people chasing the order rather than in the site's general post. Keep a copy of these in files each order you send as a conversation in an inbox, holding what you sent and the document that went with it, for the supplier's reply to land under - worth switching on whichever address they go out as, since email your site sends never appears in a mail folder otherwise. Left alone, they go out as the site's usual address exactly as they always have and nothing is filed. Each saves itself the moment you pick.
Chasing and the supplier link - whether a supplier hears from you when an order is late, how late it has to be, and how often to ask again; whether every order you send carries a link of its own, and how long those links last; whether suppliers may send you files through that link (their proforma and their acknowledgement); whether they may say what they have sent and take away a packing slip for each delivery; and whether they may send you their VAT invoice, ticking off what it covers. The first two of those three are on and the invoice one is not, and all three are greyed out entirely with the link itself off. See Chasing a late supplier, The supplier's own link, What they have sent, and the packing slip and Letting suppliers invoice you through the link.

What it does with your other modules

Purchasing works out for itself what else is on the site, and every screen behaves accordingly. Nothing disappears: a tab that cannot do its job says so and names the module that would let it.

With the Shop module:

Order lines can be picked from your catalogue.
Suppliers can be linked to the supplier names your products are filed under.
Your trading identity is borrowed from your invoice settings for any box you leave blank in Who is buying.
Goods can be taken into stock as they arrive, if you switch it on - and whoever is waiting for that product to come back is emailed at the same time. Goods sent back come off the count the same way.
Reordering works at all, since it needs something keeping count to work out what to buy.
A supplier's price list can be picked from the catalogues your shop already records for them - which is also what lets it be imported straight from the link rather than from a file - and your products can be checked against the codes and prices they currently publish.
A customer's order can be bought in at the press of a button, one draft per supplier, delivered straight to them - see Buying for a customer order.
A despatch recorded from a courier's email, on an order going straight to the customer, can be put on the customer's order - see Your customer's order.

With the UK Bookkeeping module:

Bill lines can be filed under your own expense categories as you type them, and the spend report names those categories rather than only their references.
Approving a supplier bill files it in the books as an expense, with their own invoice attached as evidence. Voiding it takes it back out. A supplier credit reduces what you spent and the VAT you reclaimed. See Straight into the books.

With neither:

Everything above is either typed in by hand (lines, suppliers) or honestly switched off (stock, reordering, the books). Suppliers, orders, approvals, deliveries, returns, bills, chasing, price lists, the exports and every report on the Reports tab work exactly as they do anywhere else. A price list is a purchasing thing: you can keep one, import it and price orders off it with no shop on the site at all. Approved bills simply stop at approved - a purchasing record with the supplier's own invoice attached, rather than a ledger entry.

For module authors: `purchase-orders.despatch-recorded`

Purchasing announces a despatch through an extension point, so the module that owns the customer's order can act on it without purchasing knowing it exists. Observers, not contributors, modelled on the shop's shop.order-paid: nothing an observer returns is used, and one that throws is logged and the next still runs. Register it serverOnly - it is database work - and restate the payload type locally rather than importing purchasing:

{
  "point": "purchase-orders.despatch-recorded",
  "id": "your-module-despatch",
  "serverOnly": true,
  "import": "./lib/despatch-observer",
  "component": "yourDespatchObserver"
}

type DespatchRecordedEvent = {
  despatchId: string                 // stable across updates to the same parcel
  change: 'new' | 'update'
  purchaseOrderNumber: string
  source: { module: 'shop'; orderId: string } | null   // from the order's source
  lines: Array<{ sourceOrderItemId: string; qty: number }>   // the customer order's own lines
  carrier: string | null
  trackingNumber: string | null      // spaces taken out
  trackingUrl: string | null
  trackingShortCode: string | null   // the code out of a follow-my-parcel link, as read
  deliveryDate: string | null        // 'YYYY-MM-DD'
  deliverySlot: [string, string] | null   // ['HH:MM', 'HH:MM']
}

It fires for a new despatch and for each real change to one (a new tracking number or link, a delivery day or slot), and not for an email that changes nothing: what was last announced is kept on the despatch, written once every observer has taken it without throwing - an observer that fails hears about it again with the next offer.

Failures. An observer throws for a passing failure (the order was busy, the database blinked) and returns for a permanent refusal (switched off, a cancelled order, tracking already there). A throw leaves the despatch pending, and the half-hourly inbound-documents job announces it again - waiting half an hour longer after each failure (up to four hours), so one that keeps failing does not hold up the rest - and after ten failed tries it stops and puts it on the Paperwork list ("Delivery tracking not passed on"), saying the parcel has to be put on the customer's order by hand. A return is taken as done. An observer that stops part way and throws is offered the same despatch again, so it should finish whatever it left undone (the shop does: lines it had not yet recorded, and the order's status). Two runs reading the same email at the same moment may both announce it, so an observer must be idempotent (the shop's is: the second time, the tracking is already on the order). A tracking link in the event has already been through purchasing's check on whose links to believe; check it again by your own rules before showing it to anybody. It fires only for an order going straight to a customer that was raised from one of their orders (source set), and only for lines that came from that order. Normalise what you are given with your own rules - which courier it is, which link you keep - since this is what the email said.

Emails

Seven emails are yours to word, under Settings → Emails → Purchase Orders. Six go to the supplier - the order itself, an amended order, a chase when it is late, a cancellation, a returns note, and the note saying you have paid their proforma - and none of those can be switched off, because a supplier who never sees your cancellation is a supplier who delivers it anyway. The seventh comes the other way: a supplier replied through their link, which lands with whoever is doing the buying. That one covers everything they can say - accepting the order, a proforma arriving, dates, shortages, a despatch and a plain message - so nothing sits waiting for somebody to happen to open the screen.

The order, the amended order and the returns note carry the PDF as an attachment. The chase does not: the supplier already has the order, and sending the same document again reads as a fresh one. If the PDF will not print for some reason, the email still goes with the lines in the body: an order that reaches the supplier beats one that does not because the paperwork sulked.

The order, the amended order, the chase and the proforma-paid note all offer a {{portalLink}} tag, which becomes the supplier's own link and disappears entirely when the link is switched off. It is in the wording as it ships. If you have already reworded one of those emails yourself, your version is the one that sends - drop {{portalLink}} in where you want it and the link starts travelling with them.

On a site running Unified Inbox, all seven can go out as one of your own inboxes rather than the site's usual address, and a copy of each can be filed in one - see Where this email goes under Settings. The supplier then answers to that address and the reply lands where the buying is done, underneath the copy of the email you sent them, attachment and all. No more reading one half of a conversation. The two switches are separate, so you can file copies without changing the address anything leaves as.

The proforma-paid note is the one email that can go somewhere else: set an Accounts department address on the supplier and tick the box beside it, and that note goes to their finance desk instead of the ordering one. See Suppliers.

The proforma-paid note can carry your proof of payment as an attachment, where one is filed against the order and you asked for it to go. Nothing in the wording has to mention it: the sentence saying it is attached is added for you, and only when something actually is.

The proforma-paid note carries {{payment}} - your payment reference and the amount, written for you as a block, so an order paid without a reference does not send "Payment reference:" followed by nothing. If you would rather build that sentence yourself, {{paymentRef}}, {{amount}} and {{proformaRef}} are all there as plain values.

Installation

Install the module from Modules in your admin, then grant whichever of the seven permissions each of your roles should have. There is nothing to configure before it will work: the settings all have sensible defaults, and the only one most sites will want to change straight away is the address goods should be delivered to.

Who can open the document page

All three documents have an address of their own, and they are deliberately not public. Anybody signed in with purchase-orders.access can open them; the thing that prints the PDF gets a signed link that stops working half an hour after it is made; and a supplier holding a live link of their own can open that one order, download it as a PDF, and download the packing slip for any delivery on it. Nobody else can read one, even knowing the number - and a link made for an order will not open a returns note or a packing slip, or the other way about.

The supplier's own key is checked twice over on a packing slip: it opens one order, and the delivery being asked for has to be on that order. So a supplier who works out that despatch numbers run in sequence still cannot read somebody else's customer's address.

That is on purpose, and it is different from an invoice. An invoice is a customer's own record and they get a permanent link to it. A purchase order is what you pay your supplier, the numbers run in sequence, and there is nobody outside the building who should be able to count their way through them.

A wrong link, an expired one or a stopped one gets the same "page not found" as a number nobody has used yet. That is deliberate: there is nothing to be gained by telling somebody which of the four it was.

Purchase Orders

Purchase Orders

What is in it

Who can do what

Suppliers

Suppliers who drop-ship

Linking to a catalogue supplier

Raising a purchase order

Approvals

Suppliers who want paying first

Filing their paperwork yourself

Reading a supplier's documents

Supplier paperwork from email

What it does

What it does not do

When it will not file something

Who counts as a supplier

Delivery tracking from email

What it reads

Which order it is for

What it records

Your customer's order

The order screen

The life of an order

For module authors: purchase-orders.sent

Checking goods in

Booking a delivery in

More than you ordered

When the rest is never coming

Stock

Sending things back

Raising one

Its life

The returns note

Stock

Supplier bills

Entering one

Checking it against the order

Their invoice, attached

Its life

Orders that close themselves

Straight into the books

Reordering

Setting a level

What it does with them

Who actually presses the button

Buying for a customer order

Having it drafted the moment they pay

Having those drafts sent by themselves

When they bought a set

Suppliers' price lists

Putting a list on file

Importing the prices

When it reads the wrong column

Pricing orders off them

Checking your shop against their list

Reports

Committed and not yet received

Late

Arrived, not invoiced - and invoiced, not arrived

Spend

Chasing a late supplier

Taking it away with you

The tile on your dashboard

The order itself

The blocks

Paper and margins

Sending it

Changing an order they already have

The supplier's own link

Letting suppliers invoice you through the link

Handling what they say

Making and stopping links

The returns note

What they have sent, and the packing slip

When the supplier will not use the link

The packing slip

Settings

What it does with your other modules

For module authors: purchase-orders.despatch-recorded

For module authors: `purchase-orders.sent`

For module authors: `purchase-orders.despatch-recorded`