Purchasing

A purchase order (PO) is your formal request to buy materials from a supplier. The Purchase Orders page lists every PO with tabs for each status, and lives under Front Counter → Purchasing in the sidebar (visible only if your user group has ERP access).

The six statuses

• Draft — still being built. This is the only status where you can change the supplier, add or remove lines, or delete the PO entirely.
• Ready — finished and approved internally, waiting to go out. Use Mark Ready when the lines are final.
• Sent — the supplier has it. Click Mark as Sent, or just use Email to Supplier — emailing a Ready PO marks it Sent automatically.
• Partial received — some items have arrived but not everything.
• Closed — every line is fully received (this happens automatically) or you closed it yourself with Close PO.
• Cancelled — called off. A cancelled PO can be brought Back to Draft if plans change.

Creating one

Click New Purchase Order. The PO number (like PO-00001) is suggested automatically. Pick a supplier, set a Requested Date if you need delivery by a certain day, and check the Ship To address (it pre-fills from your company info). After Create PO & Add Lines, the Supplier Materials catalog appears — it only shows products linked to that supplier, with their supplier part numbers and costs. Drag a material in or click +, set quantity, unit cost, and unit of measure, then Save Lines.

Once the goods start arriving, see Receiving materials against a PO.

Receiving is how you tell the system that ordered materials actually showed up. It matters because receiving is what puts the items into stock — until you receive, the system still thinks the material is on a truck somewhere.

Open the PO from the Purchase Orders list. A green Receive button appears at the top once the PO is in Ready, Sent, or Partial received status and has at least one line.

The receive window

Each line shows Ordered, Received so far, and a Receive Now box pre-filled with whatever is still outstanding. Adjust the numbers to match what is physically on the dock — short shipments are normal, just enter what arrived. You can also record a Heat # and Lot # for each line; for raw material this is how you keep traceability back to the mill certificate later. Click Confirm Receipt to finish.

What happens behind the scenes

• The on-hand quantity in Material Stock goes up by what you received.
• The material’s last cost is set to the PO line price, and its average cost is recalculated as a weighted average of old stock and the new receipt — so costing stays honest even when prices change.
• A transaction is logged (“Received on PO-00012”) with the heat and lot numbers, who received it, and when.
• The PO status updates itself: Partial received if anything is still outstanding, Closed once every line is complete.

If something goes wrong mid-save, nothing is changed at all — you will see a “Receiving failed” message and can simply try again.

Instead of working out by hand what to buy for upcoming jobs, the Auto-Generate Purchase Orders page does the math for you in three steps.

Step 1 — pick the production orders

You see every active production order (planned, scheduled, or in progress). Tick the ones to plan for and click Calculate Material Requirements. Orders without an active bill of materials are greyed out with a No BOM flag — the system cannot know what they consume, so fix the BOM first (see Bills of Materials — the recipe for a part).

Step 2 — review the requirements

For every material the table shows the gross requirement, what is on hand, what is already on order, and the resulting Net Need. Materials managed in your vending/IMS bins are treated differently: the supplier already tops them up to MAX on a cycle, so the system projects that resupply before declaring a shortage. If the schedule outruns the cycle you get an IMS Supply Cycle Alert with a suggested new max level and an Increase Max button (or Accept All Suggested Max Levels to take every suggestion at once). Items with no supplier assigned appear in a Spot Buy notice instead — they cannot be auto-ordered until a supplier is linked.

Step 3 — confirm

Shortages are grouped into one draft PO per supplier; non-stock items with a supplier become separate Spot Buy POs. You can edit the order quantity on any line, and a Rush flag warns where supply days fall short of the lead time. Click Generate Purchase Orders and everything is created in Draft status on the Purchase Orders page — nothing is sent to anyone until you review each one and move it along, as described in Purchase orders from draft to closed.

Once a PO is built, you have three ways to get it to your supplier, all on the PO page itself:

• Print — opens a clean, print-ready copy of the PO in a new tab with your company logo, the vendor and ship-to addresses, every line with pricing, and the order total.
• PDF — downloads the same document as a PDF file, handy for attaching to your own records or a different email account.
• Email to Supplier — sends a professional email straight to the supplier’s purchasing address with the PDF attached. If the PO was in Ready status, sending it this way automatically marks it Sent, so you never forget to update the status.

If the email button is greyed out or fails

The button reads No Email when the supplier record has no purchasing email address — open the supplier under Suppliers and add one. (The PO list also shows a small warning triangle next to any supplier missing an email, so you can spot these early.)

If sending fails or you see an “SMTP email settings not configured” warning, the app does not yet know how to send mail on your company’s behalf. That is set up once, by an administrator, under Company in the Email Configuration section — see Company info, logo, email, and document colors.

The colors and logo on the printed PO, the PDF, and the email all come from your company information, so the documents your suppliers see match your branding without any extra work.