Chapter 15: Working with Purchase Orders

Purchase Order is an order placed for procuring products or services from your short listed vendors. In general PO contains the PO number, date, line items (products) including the quantities and prices based on Sales Quote, Billing address, Shipping address, Terms & Conditions and others. You can use the PO for communicating your product and pricing requirements to vendors so that there will not be any obligations in future. Also you can use the PO to cross-check the products shipped to your shipping address and invoices sent to your billing address. In addition, your vendor can use PO as legal document in the event of nonpayment in a court of law for claiming damages from your side. To summarize, PO is a legal binding document that protects interests of both vendor and buyers, which can be used as legal binding document for both parties.

In PO module you can create PO for the products to be procured, associate POs to the vendors, track the status of the POs, create printer friendly format.

The Purchase Order home page contains,

• POs List
• PO Reports
• Quick Create pane
• Search
• Alphabetical Search
• Custom Views
• Page Navigation

You can perform the following operations in Purchase Orders module:

• Navigate purchase orders
• Search purchase orders (Alphabetical or advanced search options)
• Create new purchase orders (Form filling or duplicate options)
• Associate purchase orders with other records
• Print purchase orders details
• View reports
• Delete purchase orders (individually or in bulk)
• Customize Purchase Orders

Navigating Purchase Orders

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can navigate purchase orders available in the Purchase Orders List.

To navigate purchase orders

1. Click the Purchase Orders tab.
2. In the Purchase Orders Home page under the Purchase Orders List section, click the Start, Previous, Next, or End link to access the list of purchase orders.

Searching Purchase Orders

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can search the purchase orders alphabetically or filling the required information in Search box.

To search purchase orders

1. Click the Purchase Orders tab.
2. In the Purchase Order Search section, do one of the following:
   • Specify the search criteria in Search box and click the Go button. Or
   • Select one of the alphabetical search links.
3. In the Purchase Orders List page, list of purchase orders are displayed as per search criteria.

Creating Purchase Orders

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permission)

In the Zoho CRM system, you can store purchase order details by entering data into the purchase order form.

Note: Some of the standard fields listed below may not be visible/editable depending on your organization business process and field-level security settings. In case your organization added/modified fields please contact your System Administrator for more details about usage of the other fields.

In the Purchase Order: Edit form, you need to specify the purchase order-related information. The following table provides descriptions of the various fields in the form.

List of Standard Purchase Order-related Fields

To create purchase orders

1. Click the New Purchase Order link.
2. In the Purchase Order: page, specify the purchase order details.
   
   

   Note: Subject, Account Name, Billing Address, Shipping Address, and Product Details are mandatory field. Refer to the List of Standard Purchase Order-related Fields section for more details.

   
   
3. Click Save.

Associating Purchase Orders with Other Records

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permission)

You can associate the purchase order with other records such as, activities, attachments, and notes.

• Activities: To add tasks related to purchase orders.
• Attachments: To attach files to purchase orders.
• Notes: To add notes to purchase orders.

To associate Purchase Orders with other Records

1. Click the Purchase Orders tab.
2. In the Purchase Orders Home page, under the Purchase Order List section, select the required purchase order.
3. In the Purchase Order: <Purchase Order Name> page, do the following:
   • Edit the Purchase Order details.
   • Create tasks.
   • Add files and notes.
4. You can close the purchase order page once all the required information is updated for the purchase order.

Printing Purchase Order Details

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can view a printable form and print the purchase order details using browser’s Print function.

To print purchase order details

1. Click the Purchase Orders tab.
2. In the Purchase Orders: Home page under the Purchase Orders List section, select the required purchase order.
3. In the Purchase Order: <Purchase Order Name> page click the Printable View button.
4. In the Purchase Order: <Purchase Order Name> page, click the Print Page button to print the document.

Viewing Reports

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permission)

You can directly access some of the standard reports pertaining to purchase orders from the Purchase Orders Reports section. By default, the following reports are displayed under Purchase Orders module:

• Vendors Vs Purchases
• Contacts Vs Purchases
• Purchase Orders by Status
  

To view purchase order report

1. Click the Purchase Orders tab.
2. In the Purchase Orders: Home page under the Purchase Orders Reports section, click the required report link.
3. The report is displayed in Reports page, which can be further customized as per your requirements.

For more details about reports customization refer to Chapter 19: Working with Reports.

Deleting Purchase Orders

(Access Privilege: Read/Write/Delete permission)

Rarely, you may need to remove the unnecessary purchase orders, which are not tracked further. This will help you manage your purchase orders in a better way. You can delete purchase orders either individually or in bulk.

Warning: The deleted purchase orders are temporarily stored in Recycle Bin. If required you can restore the deleted purchase orders again. But if you delete purchase orders from Recycle Bin, you cannot restore again.

To delete purchase orders individually

1. Click the Purchase Orders tab.
2. In the Purchase Orders: Home page, select the purchase order to be deleted.
3. In the Purchase Order: <Purchase Order Name> page, click Delete.
4. In the Confirmation dialog, click OK to delete the purchase order permanently.

To delete purchase orders in bulk

1. Click the Purchase Orders tab.
2. In the Purchase Orders: Home page under the Purchase Orders List section, select the purchase orders to be deleted using the Select check box.
3. Click the Delete button.
4. In the Confirmation dialog, click OK to delete the selected purchase orders permanently.

Customizing Purchase Orders

(Access Privilege: Customize ZohoCRM.com permission)

Customization of the Purchase Orders module includes, renaming the tab name, modifying the pick list values in standard fields, adding new custom fields, modifying PO page layout, and show/hide the related list views according to your Purchase management process requirements.

For more details, refer to Chapter 24: Customizing Zoho CRM