Purchase Order
The approved Purchase Order (PO) document serves two purposes. Externally it is a legal contract with a vendor to deliver goods or services. Internally it provides the mechanism to generate documents for payments and receipt of goods. It differs from most other documents in three ways:
• The PO is not generated by initiating a blank document that is then completed by the initiator. Instead, the system automatically generates a PO (referred to as an APO) from an approved requisition or by assigning a contract manager to an approved requisition. When creating the new PO, the system automatically populates it with information from the related requisition.
• The document can be worked on by any purchasing staff member. Many other documents are only editable by the initiator. An in process PO can be edited by any staff member who is a member of the Purchasing Processor role.
• A purchase order can be amended after it is approved. Many purchasing organizations refer to this amended PO as a change order.
For more
information about modifying an existing PO, see Performing Other Activities on a
PO.
PO documents may be retrieved via document search. From this point, the purchasing staff may finalize the details of a purchase order and transmit it via fax or print it for mailing to the vendor.
You may
use the regular Document Search to
retrieve a PO, but this form of search does not include PO-specific search
criteria.
For more information about a PO search, see Purchase Orders, in Purchasing / Accounts Payable
Custom Document Searches.
Document Layout