How to enter purchase orders

Purchase orders are a contractual agreement between you and the supplier for the provision of goods and services for a price. The purchase order defines the terms (prices, quantities and times) by which your supplier will deliver products or provide services to you.

You can create purchase orders using these options:

  • Generating orders from a suggested order list.
  • Generating orders to fulfil purchase requisitions.
  • Creating the purchase order from scratch.

Watch a video

Record a purchase order (video)

Generate suggested orders

This creates purchase orders automatically based on the following criteria.

  • Your current stock levels fall below the minimum.
  • Where you don't have enough stock to fulfil in your sales orders.
  • You want to order goods to fulfil a sales order directly (back to back orders).

This is useful if you closely manage your stock levels and never want to less than a certain number at your warehouse at any time. You'll also need to use generate orders if you want to order goods to directly fulfil your sales orders - back to back orders.

To be able to generate orders, you need specify a preferred supplier on your stock records.

Generate orders from requisitions

If you use purchase requisitions, you can generate purchase orders from authorised requisition lines.

Once the individual lines in the purchase requisition have been authorised, you can amend any details about the items required and choose how they will be fulfilled. For example, you can choose which suppliers to order from, or you may want to fulfil from existing stock.

Purchase orders are generated from the requisition lines according to the chosen supplier and fulfilment details.

  • Purchase orders are created for requisition lines with the Fulfilment Type of POP Order.

  • Requisitions for exactly the same stock item from the same supplier will be combined into a single purchase order.

    • The quantities from requisition lines will be combined in a single order if they have the same Item Code and are ordered from the same Supplier.
    • The requisition lines will also be combined to the same line on the order if they have the same Unit Net Price, otherwise there will be a separate line in the order for the quantity at each unit price.
  • If a requisition line is fulfilled from multiple suppliers, a purchase order will be generated for each supplier.

Entering individual purchase orders

Here you choose the supplier and manually add lines to the order. You can add:

  • Stock items - these are items that you've created a record for the in the Stock control section. These can be any of kind of item that you want to keep track of such as a physical stock item, a service, labour charges and so on.
  • Free text items - these are lines that you can add when you want to record a value on an order but don't need a stock record for it.
  • Additional charges - these are used to add any charges such as insurance, delivery or warranty. You can add a charge on an order by order by basis. If you often need to add the same charges, you can create records for them. This makes it quicker to add the charges and ensures the VAT rate, value and nominal account are always correct.
  • Comment lines - use these to add any other information to an order, such as delivery instructions, or notes for your suppler. The comment is generally printed on the order documentation, however you can just add your own notes and prevent it from being printed if you want to keep the information private.

Entering orders for foreign currency suppliers

When you are entering orders for foreign currency customers, the exchange rate set on the Currencies and exchange rates screen is displayed on the Order Details tab. This exchange rate is used to calculate the price of any items you add to the order, because prices are stored in base currency. You must check and change the exchange rate, if required, before adding items to the order, otherwise the default exchange rate will be used.

Note: The exchange rate used to post the invoice values to your nominal accounts is set when you print the invoice for the customer.

When you add items to the order, the VAT is set on each line. This means you can use different VAT rates for different items. When you buy products and services from suppliers in other countries, the VAT rate needs to reflect this. Sage 200 will always use the VAT rate set on the supplier's account when the supplier's Country Code is set to anything other than GB. When the foreign currency supplier is selected on an order, the VAT Rate on the supplier account overrides the VAT rate on a stock item.

Amend order status or cancel

You can put orders On hold and Off hold, or cancel an order.

Open: Purchase Orders > Purchase Orders > Amend Order Status.

Orders can have one of the following statuses:

  • Live: A new purchase order is Live once you save the details.

  • On hold: An order will be On hold if it has been stopped for any reason.

  • Completed: If the order is fully satisfied and the invoice has been received and matched to the order, its status will be Completed.

    Note: A purchase order that has been cancelled also has the status of Completed.

What do you want to do?

Enter or amend a purchase order

Generate suggested purchase orders

Generate purchase orders from requisitions

Record purchase order invoices

See also

Record a purchase order (video)

Next steps

Receiving goods

Related information

Generate suggested purchase orders

Generate purchase orders from requisitions

Enter purchase returns

Process purchase returns

Supplier credit notes and refunds (receipts)

Write off incomplete purchase orders and returns

Check the progress of purchase orders

Other useful information

For more information about EU zero rated sales, please see the details on the HMRC (gov.uk).