Purchase Orders

Purchase orders are used to track and manage orders to outside organizations.

You can create two types of purchase orders:

• Regular – With regular purchase orders, line items on regular purchase orders are posted, increasing the encumbrance balance.

• Blanket – An order for a large quantity of an item (more than is currently needed). The order is a commitment to purchase, typically made to obtain a volume discount or ensure you receive hard to get items. You can generate regular purchase orders from the blanket purchase order until the blanket order is satisfied.

  You do not post blanket line items. Use blanket line items and the post status and post date as defaults for the regular purchase orders generated from the blanket order.

Tip: Previously, in database view, you could create template purchase orders, a vendor-specific purchase order default record. Now, you can use previous purchase orders as a template. When you create the new purchase order, after you select the vendor you can copy a previous purchase order as the template for the new one. For more information, see Copy previous purchase order on the Add purchase orders help.

To add or view existing purchase orders, navigate to Payables, Purchase orders. You can also add and manage a vendor’s purchase orders from their record. For more information, see Vendor Record. If you don't know the exact number of a purchase order, you can search for a partial number and select it in the results.