Purchase Orders

Use purchase orders to track, control, and manage purchases from outside organizations. Purchase orders help you monitor spending commitments, maintain accurate financial records, and streamline vendor transactions.

Purchase order types

You can create two types of purchase orders, depending on your purchasing needs:

• Regular – use regular purchase orders to record specific purchases.

  • Post line items to increase the encumbrance balance

  • Track committed funds as soon as you create the order

  • Maintain accurate, up-to-date budget reporting

• Blanket – use blanket purchase orders to manage long-term or high-volume purchasing agreements.

  • Commit to a large quantity to secure pricing or availability

  • Generate regular purchase orders from the blanket order as needed

  • Apply default settings, such as post status and post date, to generated orders

  • Avoid posting blanket line items directly

Purchase order creation

To save time and ensure consistency, you can copy a previous purchase order when creating a new one.

After you select a vendor, select a previous purchase order to use as a template. This helps you reduce manual data entry, maintain consistent purchasing details, and quickly recreate recurring orders.

For more information, see Copy previous purchase order and Add purchase orders

Where to manage purchase orders

To add or view purchase orders, select Payables, Purchase orders, then open a vendor record to manage that vendor’s purchase orders.

If you do not know the full purchase order number, search using a partial number and select the correct result.

Generate and print purchase orders

You can generate and print purchase orders from a purchase order record or from Payables, then Communications.

For details, see Purchase Order Records and Generate Purchase Order Forms.