Raising a purchase order and receiving the goods

Suppliers and agents

Every supplier your organisation buys from directly lives in Procurement → Suppliers. Each supplier's page gives you a Purchase Order button to start a new order, plus a side menu with Products, Purchase Orders and Stock Deliveries so far.

Some suppliers are only reachable through an agent - a person or company who buys on your behalf rather than shipping to you directly. Agents have their own list under Procurement → Agents, and work the same way: purchase orders and deliveries against an agent are recorded on the agent's page instead of the supplier's.

Raising a purchase order

From the supplier's page, press Purchase Order. This creates a new order in the In process state - it exists, but nothing has been sent to the supplier yet.

While it is in process:

• Use Add Product to add a line for a product you want, one at a time.
• Each line can be adjusted while the order is still in process.
• Delete removes the whole order, as long as nothing has been sent to the supplier yet.

Once you have added everything you want, press Submit. This sends the order onward and moves it to Submitted.

What the states mean

A purchase order moves through a short, deliberate chain:

• In process - you're still building the order. Add products, submit, or delete it.
• Submitted - the order has gone to the supplier. You can Confirm it once the supplier has agreed to it, Undo Submit to pull it back to In process if something needs changing, or Cancel it altogether.
• Confirmed - the supplier has accepted the order. You can set or change the Delivery date (the estimated arrival), and press New Delivery to create the stock delivery that will receive the goods. Until a delivery exists for it, you can also Undo Confirm to send it back to Submitted.

From here the order settles on its own as its stock deliveries progress - there's nothing further to click on the purchase order itself. It ends up Settled once everything has arrived, or Not Received/Cancelled if it didn't work out.

The stock delivery: recording what arrived

Pressing New Delivery on a confirmed purchase order creates the stock delivery for you, already linked to that order's lines. You can also start one from scratch under Procurement → Stock Deliveries, which just asks for a delivery number and date.

A stock delivery's page has tabs for its Items, the Pending Items still to deal with, Done Items, Attachments, and History.

The delivery then moves through its own states:

• In process / Confirmed / Ready to ship - while it's still on its way, you can press Mark as Dispatched once the supplier has sent it, Mark as Received if it's already arrived, or Delete if it was created by mistake.
• Dispatched - the parcel is on the road. Mark as Received once it lands at your warehouse, or Unmark as Dispatched to undo that if it hasn't actually left.
• Received - the goods are physically at the warehouse. From here you check each item against what was ordered; the delivery becomes Checked once that's done, or you can Unmark as Received or Cancel the whole delivery.
• Checked - if nothing has been placed into stock yet, you can still Cancel here.
• Booking in / Booked in - the checked quantities are being booked into the warehouse's stock.
• Booked in - press Place to put the received stock away. This is the delivery's final working state.

Checking an item means confirming how much of each line actually arrived - not every order arrives complete, and short or extra quantities show up on the Under/Over delivered items tab so nothing gets lost in the gap between what you ordered and what showed up.

Putting it together

In short: raise the order against the supplier, submit it, wait for the supplier to confirm, then create the delivery from the confirmed order. Mark the delivery dispatched when the supplier ships it, received when it lands, work through checking each item, and finally place it - at which point the stock is in the warehouse and ready to sell.