If you haven’t used purchase orders before, we have a useful article on “what is a purchase order” which has some background information. This article explains how to create a purchase order in Zahara. 

The next panel – if you are using custom fields – is the custom fields panel. Any fields you have enabled or set up will appear here. These will respect any parents and children that may have been created as well. 

The next panel is where you create the line items or the narrative of the order.

Product selector – if the Supplier chosen has recorded products / items, these can be selected from the “Choose a Product” selector and dropped onto the line items. 

Switching to table view – there is a table icon on the right which will switch you onto a table view – this is useful when you have created multiple line items.

Import from CSV – here you can import line items from a CSV file – see this dedicated article

Now you can populate your line item, adjusting any of the fields or pre-selected values. If you are creating a one line item order, you will click Continue, in blue bottom right. If you are adding more line items, you will click Add new line item. Switching to table view will enable you to see all your lines as shown below:

You can then edit individual line items by clicking the blue edit icon, or switch back into edit mode by clicking the table icon again. You can also bulk update all line items by selecting them as shown below:

Once you have all of your lines perfect, you can move on by clicking continue. 

The next panel is the optional Budgets panel. This is shown below and is for the creator’s benefit to see how the Budget (if any) is affected by the order. 

The delivery panels shows the default delivery address. This is set in Business Settings> Purchase Orders and will be one of Business Unit, Division or Project. You can change the address though. You can select any other address or type in a new address

You can also change the Required by date. This can be set at a Line item level if set in Business Settings > Purchase Orders. Otherwise, set the required by date. This can be used as a value on a purchase order and for reporting / accruals. 

This panel is all about comments and providing the narrative for either an approver or a supplier. Internal comments is the field for approval comments – perhaps the justification for the purchase. The supplier field can be used to add comments that show on the Purchase Order PDF like “need this urgently”

You can add documents to the purchase order. These might be supporting documents for the supplier or the approver. You can drag them over to the panel and then select what kind of file you are attaching. This is limited to one document only though. 

At the bottom of the Narrative panel is the workflow selector. If you have permission to override the workflow, you can do that here. Otherwise the pre-set workflow will show. 

You can save the purchase order as a Draft at any time. This means the Purchase can be edited but hasn’t been submitted yet. If a purchase is saved as a Draft, it will show with a Draft icon as shown below: 

You can edit the Draft by clicking the Purchase Order number or you can click the approval status icon to reveal a menu with the ability to click Raise. 

Once an order is raised, you can view it or edit it any time by clicking the purchase order number from the list view. The Document Actions menu has the following:

• Edit – this allows you to edit the purchase order, provided you have purchase order update permissions and were the originator. 
• Reset Matching allows you to release any linked invoice attached to the order.
• Download will be an option to download the PDF of the purchase order, provided the order has been approved and has completed the workflow 
• Send to supplier will bring up a box to allow you to send the PO to the supplier 
• Delete will allow you to delete the PO provided you have the permission and the order hasn’t yet been sent to the supplier