When you sub-rent gear, sub-contract services, or work with freelance staff, you might like to send a purchase order to confirm.
A purchase order (PO) is a document that provides details of the goods or services that you’d like from a supplier or vendor.
With Purchase Orders in Current RMS, you can:
get an overview of all purchase orders on your system
create purchase orders directly from opportunity costs
create manual purchase orders
authorize and mark purchase orders as sent
set expected arrival date and notes against purchase orders
generate and send branded purchase order layouts to your suppliers
Why use purchase orders?
They provide clear, written confirmation of the order.
They put processes in place to help you control your purchasing workflow.
They have a unique number that you can use to track the order throughout its lifecycle. Your vendor’s delivery note and invoice should reference this number.
They let you to better forward plan your budgets and logistics, allowing you see which goods have been requested for how much.
In some regions, purchase orders are considered legally binding contracts once accepted by your supplier.
How can you create a purchase order?
There’s a couple of ways you can create purchase orders in Current RMS:
Directly from an opportunity using the costs view
Manually by creating manual purchase orders
Raising a purchase order from an opportunity creates a link between the opportunity and the purchase order, meaning that all of the key information about a job is on one page.
Purchase order workflow
There’s five steps to managing a purchase order in Current RMS.
Create purchase order
First, create your purchase order.Authorize
You might have a process in your team where managers or your accounts team must approve a purchase order. Mark a purchase order as authorized to say that it’s approved.Mark as sent
Once approved, send to your supplier and mark as sent. You may use a discussion in Current to send your purchase order straight from your system.Set expected arrival
At this point, you may store an expected arrival date and delivery notes in anticipation of the goods arriving.Complete
When you’ve received the goods or the services have been supplied, mark a purchase order as completed.
If you created a purchase order from an opportunity cost, when you receive the invoice from the supplier you might like to update the cost with the actual cost.
Post to Xero
Once a purchase order has been completed, you can now look to post that over to Xero. It isn't possible to post purchase orders for our other accounting integrations just yet but if this is something you'd like to see, please reach out via the green help bubble in the bottom right hand corner of your system.