Purchase order management
- Purchase order total
- $827.21
- Line total before discount
- $740
- Discount agreed
- $37
Nothing in these worksheets is a figure we found somewhere. Every number comes from the inputs you enter and the method stated on the page: the discount comes off the line total before tax, tax is charged on the goods and not on shipping, and the budget check is your own remaining balance less your own estimate. The defaults are a worked example, not a recommendation and not a benchmark.
Purchase order management is what happens after the order is issued, and it is the part small businesses most often have no system for at all. The order goes out, and then nothing is tracked until either the goods or the invoice arrives. Managing it properly means very little work: knowing which orders are outstanding, which have been partly received, which are late against the lead time you were quoted, and which have been invoiced and can be closed. Four states and a date on each, and most of what goes wrong stops going wrong.
Try the free worksheet Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Know what is outstanding, at any moment
An order that has been approved and sent is a commitment whether or not anything has arrived. A list of outstanding orders with their values is the difference between knowing what you have spent and knowing what you have committed, and only the second one is useful for cash planning.
Record partial receipt honestly
Half a delivery is the case everybody's spreadsheet gets wrong. Recording what actually arrived against what was ordered is what makes a short delivery visible before the full invoice is paid, rather than after.
Close the order against the invoice
An order stays open until the invoice is matched to it. Closing is the point where a discrepancy surfaces, and on the worked example a $827.21 order billed at $869 is a $42 gap that is worth a phone call and is invisible without the order to compare against.
Will it do what you need for Purchase order management?
Tell us how your business orders things today and what keeps going wrong with it, and we will tell you plainly whether Requly fixes it.
Purchase order management: common questions
What states should a purchase order move through?
Requested, approved, ordered, received and invoiced is enough for almost any small business, with a cancelled state for the ones that do not happen. Each transition needs a date.
How do we handle a partial delivery?
Record the quantity actually received against the order and leave the order open. The gap between ordered and received is what you chase, and it is also what stops a full invoice being paid for a part delivery.
When should an order be closed?
When the invoice has been matched to it and any discrepancy is resolved. Closing on delivery is common and loses the last check, which is the one that catches billing errors.
Requly Pro
Keeping the orders
The worksheet prices one order on one day. Pro remembers it: the requisition it came from, the number it was issued under, who approved it, what has been received against it and which invoice it was matched to.
- Download the order as a file you can send to a supplier
- Send the order out without the Requly watermark on it
- Come back to this order with the figures still in it
- Put your own logo on the orders your suppliers receive
- Take every requisition and order out at once, as a file
- Send the purchase order to the supplier without leaving the record
- Not used by Requly: nothing here takes a payment from your suppliers
- Match orders against the bills your books already carry
$49per month, whole team
Start Requly Pro PricingRequly Pro is $49 a month and renews on the same date each month at the same $49 until you cancel. There is no introductory rate, no minimum term and no automatic step up in price. If the price ever changes you keep the price you signed at.