Populating and Sending a Purchase Order

Background

Purchase orders are typically raised from specific areas within strokeone, and therefore pre-populated with much of the information necessary to place an order. However,.certain fields need to be populated before the order can be considered finalised and communicated to the supplier.

About this task

This topic will instruct you how to populate the requisite fields on an order, and then send it to the supplier.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you have opened a raised but not yet finalised or sent a purchase order.

The Purchase order will look somewhat like this:-

Procedure

Click in the Supplier Contact field. This will activate the contact picker dialog.
Use this functionality to locate and select the supplier contact.

Note:
When created, a Contact must be associated to a single Company within .strokeone. Therefore, when you select a supplier contact, the Supplier Company field will automatically default with the corresponding company which the supplier contact is associated to.
The Supplier Company field records the organisation with whom the order is being placed. It should automatically populate based on the selected Supplier Contact

Note
a) It is possible to populate the Supplier Company field before populating the Supplier Contact field. If you click with Supplier Company field you will be taken into a filterable look ahead search dialog. to find and select the required supplying company.

b) However, as a Company can have one or more contacts, the corresponding Supplier Contact field does not automatically populate. Therefore is you populate Supplier Company first, you must return to the Supplier Contact field to select the corresponding supplier contact.

Given this, it is recommended wherever possible to populate the supplier contact first.
The Owner Contact and Owner Company reflect the owner of the stock items that are being ordered. Typically the owner of items being ordered will be Strokeone Software Limited, and this will automatically have populated in Owner Company.

However, there can be scenarios where a customer has ordered stock directly from the supplier for delivery to Strokeone Software Limited, either to be used in a job order or for another purpose. In these scenarios, a purchase order needs to be raised internally to reflect this (but not emailed or sent), and provide a mechanism by which to reference the customer ordered goods when they come in.

Should this be the case, then Owner Contact and Owner Company should be populated with the details of the customer whom placed the purchase order.
Mechanistically, populating these two fields is functionally identical to populating Supplier Contact and Supplier Company, and again it is recommended to select the Owner Contact field as this will cause the Owner Company field to default.
The Delivery Contact and Delivery Company fields denote the entity to whom the items contained on the purchase order should be delivered, and as such they drive the defaulting of the delivery address fields.

Typically, Delivery Company will have been pre-populated with Strokeone Software Limited.
Delivery Contact will most likely need to be populated, and reflects the person whom is expecting the delivery. This may be the person whom is raised the order

To populate Delivery Contact, click in the field to activate the Contact picker dialog.
The Contact Picker dialog is pre-filtered to show only those contacts that exist for the selected Delivery Company.
Select the Delivery Contact you need.
The Delivery Address data fields are taken directly from the address fields that are populated on the company which has been selected in the Delivery Company field.
These can be overwritten if necessary.

If the order is to be delivered to a specific venue, click the Use Venue button will activate the Venue Picker dialog to facilitate this
Internal Contact should already be populated with the user whom created the purchase order. If you need to alter this, click the drop-down arrow to display a list of staff members.
Internal Department is pre-populated with the Default Department value of the Staff Member who has been selected as the Internal Contact in step 6)
Again, you can alter this if necessary by selecting another value from the drop-down list.
In the Date Ordered field, click to activate a calendar field and select the date the order is placed.
TBC: This should be automated - set as to creation date or emailed date **
The PO Number field is automatically populated with the next internal sequence number. This represents a unique internal reference within Strokeone Software Limited for this order.
The Supplier Invoice # can be used to record the corresponding invoice that the supplier sends in respect of this purchase order. This information may not yet be known at the time of the order being placed, but will be used later by the accounts department.
The Owner PO number field should be populated when Owner Contact and Owner Company is not Strokeone Software Limited, and represents the reference that the customer whom placed the order directly with the supplier has.
If the Owner Company is Strokeone Software Limited, this field should not be populated.
The Notes box allows you to record any additional information regarding the order.

The Purchase Order Lines Tab

This tab shows the stock line items that are being ordered via this Purchase order.

The following information is shown for each stock line item being ordered:-

Field	Comments
Status	icon the receipt status of the stock line item on the order. This will be red when the order has not yet been sent.
Suppliers SKU	The SKU reference (as known by the supplier) for the stock line item. This is taken from the stock line item record.
Description	The description of the stock line item
Type	This is blank for all stock line items except Blank Screens, where it can have one of two values:- New: Restretch: See Understanding the Life cycle of a Screen for more details.
Quantity Ordered	This is the quantity of the stock line item being ordered. Enter in here the numeric number you wish to order.
Quantity Received	This records the numeric quantity of the item that has been received when one or more deliveries occurs on the purchase order.
Quantity Cancelled	This records the numeric quantity of the item that has been cancelled from the order.
Quantity Outstanding	This records the numeric quantity of the item that has been ordered and is yet to be received. Calculated as:- Quantity Ordered - Quantity Received - Quantity Cancelled.
Unit Cost	This is defaulted using the supplier pricing data from the stock line item and represents the monetary cost of one unit of the stock line item. If necessary, and procedures allow, you can overwrite this.
Total Cost	Calculated field [Quantity Outstanding * Unit Cost]

When you are populating a purchase order that has been raised from elsewhere in strokeone, you should only have to populate the Quantity Ordered value.
If you are satisfied that the order is finalised, proceed to step 21) to send it.

However, you may wish to add additional stock line items to the order, in which case proceed to step 14)
Click the new record icon to the upper right of the Purchase Order Lines Tab.
The item picker form appears
In the Product type drop-down (1), select the type of product for the stock line item you want to add.
The screen will list all the stock line items with a product type that matches what was selected in step 16)
You can further filter down the list of stock line items by entering some search criteria in the product's attribute headers (2)
for example:-

Note: The attribute headers that are displayed vary according to the product type selected in step 16)
Once you have located the stock line item you wish to add to the order, click the corresponding Select button at the right of the row,
Repeat steps 14) to 19) if you wish to add multiple stock line items to the purchase order.

Sending the Purchase Order

Click the Email Order button in the upper right of the screen.
This causes the following to occur:
1. the default email application on your computer is opened
2. strokeone automatically creates an email with the following attributes:-
  
  (1) To: <email address for supplier_contact on purchase order>
  (2) Subject:
  (3) Email Body Text: <the purchase order key information, including delivery address, PO Number, date ordered, invoice address>
  
  Note: the Subject and body text verbiage can be customised if required
3. The status of the Purchase Order updates to sent. The purchase order cannot be modified now in terms of adding items to it.
  Items can however be cancelled from it
4. For audit purposes, a PDF record of the order sent is stored against the purchase order on the PDF tab
Ensure that you send the email from your email application