Purchase Order Maker

A purchase order is a small piece of paper with a large job: it fixes the price before the goods move, it gives everyone a number to quote, and it records who agreed to spend the money. This article goes through the order maker field by field — the numbering scheme, the two addresses, the line columns, the tax summary, carriage, the approval limit and the checks — and explains the reasoning behind each one so the orders you raise hold up later.

What a purchase order actually does

An invoice is a demand for money about something that has already happened. A purchase order is the opposite: it is a written offer to buy, made before anything moves, and its whole value lies in being checkable afterwards. When the delivery van arrives, somebody compares the delivery note against the order. When the invoice arrives, somebody compares it against both. That comparison is called a three-way match, and it is the reason organisations insist on orders at all.

Without an order, the price is whatever the supplier's invoice says it is. With one, the price was agreed in writing by a named person on a named date, and any difference has to be explained rather than simply paid. Small businesses often skip this until the first time a supplier quietly invoices at list price instead of the price the sales rep promised on the phone.

The second job is authorisation. An order carries a signature, and that signature is the record of who committed the organisation to the money. A finance team that cannot tell who approved a spend has no way to enforce a budget. This is why the sheet ends with two signature lines: one for the person authorising the spend, and one for the supplier to acknowledge the order back.

The order number is the primary key

Everything else on the sheet can be wrong and recoverable. The number cannot. It appears on the delivery note, on the supplier's invoice, on the payment run and in the accounts, and it is the string everyone searches for when something goes missing. An invoice that quotes no order number is the single most common reason a supplier waits an extra month to be paid, because it lands in a pile that nobody can match to anything.

So the number here is not a plain text box you fill in by hand. The Numbering scheme field takes a small template. The tokens {YYYY} and {YY} become the year, {MM} the month and {DD} the day, all read from today's date on your own computer. A run of zeros, written as {0000}, is the counter, and the number of zeros decides how many digits it is padded to. Everything else in the box prints exactly as typed, so BW/{YY}{MM}/{000} is as valid a scheme as PO-{YYYY}-{0000}.

The counter is kept against the scheme with the date tokens already resolved. That sounds like a technicality and it is the useful part: PO-2026-0001 and PO-2027-0001 are separate runs, so the first order of January starts at one again with nobody remembering to reset anything. Keep the year out of the scheme and you get one unbroken run that never restarts, which some organisations prefer. Both behaviours come out of the same field.

The number advances only when you press Issue the next number. Opening the page shows you the next unused number without claiming it. This matters more than it sounds: if the counter moved on every visit, an afternoon of half-started orders would leave gaps in the sequence, and gaps in a purchase-order sequence are exactly the thing an auditor stops to ask about.

Two addresses, because goods and invoices go to different places

Your own address at the top of the sheet is where the invoice should be sent. The Deliver to box further down is where the goods should physically arrive. On a routine office order these are the same, and the Same as my address button copies one into the other in a click. On a construction order, a site delivery or anything drop-shipped to a customer, they are nothing alike, and an order that offers only one address quietly invites the supplier to guess.

The two boxes underneath are worth filling in even when they feel like fuss. For the attention of names the person or the gate, which is what stops a pallet being left at a locked reception. Delivered by records whether the supplier is bringing it, sending it by carrier, or whether you are collecting — a distinction that decides who pays if it never turns up.

Required by is a date the supplier is being asked to agree to. Putting it in an email instead of on the order is how a delivery date becomes a matter of memory. It also feeds one of the checks: an order whose required-by date falls before its order date is flagged, because that is nearly always a typing slip in the year.

The line columns, and why the unit is one of them

Each line carries a code, a description, a quantity, a unit, a unit price and a tax rate. The code is the supplier's own reference. Using theirs rather than yours means the person picking the order in their warehouse is reading something they recognise, which removes an entire class of wrong deliveries.

The unit is the column people leave out and then regret. Fourteen sheets of plywood, fourteen packs of plywood and fourteen pallets of plywood are three very different deliveries and three very different invoices. Ordering six boxes of screws when you meant six screws is a small embarrassment; ordering six pallets is a conversation with a manager. The unit box offers the usual set — each, box, case, pack, sheet, metre, litre, kg, hour, day and so on — and accepts anything else you type.

Quantity and unit price are both allowed to be fractional. Trade prices for small components genuinely run to four decimal places, and 0.0325 per washer is an ordinary figure on an ordinary price list. The line amount is worked out by multiplying quantity by unit price and rounding once at that point, so a thousand washers comes to 32.50. A tool that rounded the price first would show the same line as costing nothing at all.

The star button beside a line saves it as a reusable item. After that, typing the code into a line brings the item back. The unit and the tax rate belong to the item, so they are always restored from it. The description and the price are filled only when the line has none — a price you have just negotiated and typed is never overwritten because a code happened to match, which is how last year's price quietly creeps back onto an order.

Net or gross prices, and why it is a single switch

Trade suppliers usually quote prices net of tax and add it at the bottom. Retail suppliers usually quote prices with tax already inside. Neither convention is wrong and both will land on your desk in the same week. The Unit prices are dropdown decides which one you are typing, and everything downstream adjusts.

In net mode the line amount is the price before tax, tax is added to it, and the order total is the sum of the two. In gross mode the line amount already contains the tax, so the net figure is worked backwards out of it and the order total is simply the sum of the lines. The column heading on the printed sheet changes to say which one you chose, so nobody reading the paper has to guess.

Set the switch to match the price list in front of you rather than converting the figures in your head. Converting by hand is where a decimal point goes missing, and a price list retyped at the wrong basis produces an order that is out by a fifth — large enough to matter, small enough that nobody notices until the invoice does not match.

Tax summarised by rate, not by line

The totals block shows one line for each tax rate used on the order, with the net amount that rate applies to and the tax on it. That layout is not decoration. It is the layout the supplier's invoice will use, and the two figures have to agree for the invoice to be matched and paid without a query.

The tax on each band is worked out once, from that band's own net total, rather than being calculated line by line and added up. The difference is a rounding one and it is small — usually a penny — but a penny is quite enough to stop an automated match and put an invoice into somebody's exception queue. Working on the band total is also what tax authorities generally expect.

Mixed rates on one order are completely normal. Books at one rate and stationery at another, or a zero-rated item sitting beside standard-rated ones, all sit happily on the same sheet and produce two or three bands in the totals. Set the usual rate once in Tax rate for new lines so most lines are right by default, then change the odd one.

Carriage belongs in a tax band, not on its own

Delivery charges get their own box because they are not a line item you are buying — you cannot receive them into stock and nobody counts them off a pallet. But they are taxed, usually at the same rate as the goods, and the tax rate box beside the charge is there to say so.

Carriage then joins the band of that rate rather than sitting on a separate tax line. This is what any invoice you receive will do, and it is worth knowing why: on most tax systems delivery follows the treatment of the thing being delivered, so a standard-rated order attracts standard-rated carriage. Where an order is zero-rated the carriage often is too, and putting zero in the box handles it.

The totals block shows goods and carriage separately before the subtotal, so an approver can see at a glance that thirty-five of a four-hundred pound order is transport. That is frequently the number somebody wants to argue about, and it is easier to argue about when it is visible.

Suppliers and items you only type once

Most ordering is repeat ordering. The same six suppliers, the same forty products, different quantities each month. Save this supplier stores the name, address, contact, your account number with them and their usual payment terms; picking the name from the list afterwards brings all of it back. Saving again under the same name updates the record rather than making a second one.

The item list works the same way from the other direction. Save a line with the star, and afterwards you can either pick it from the Saved items dropdown and press Add it as a line, or simply type its code into a blank line. If the last line on the order is still untouched, an inserted item fills it rather than leaving an empty row behind.

Both lists live in this browser's own storage on this device. There is no account and nothing is sent anywhere, which also means they do not follow you to another computer and clearing your browsing data removes them. If those lists become valuable to you, export an order as CSV now and again so the details exist somewhere outside a browser profile.

The approval limit and the other checks

Nearly every organisation has a figure above which one signature is not enough. Put yours in the Approval limit box and the side panel tells you, while you are still building the order, that this one needs a second signature. Finding that out before printing is considerably better than finding it out from the finance team after the goods have arrived and the commitment already exists.

Four other checks run as you type. An order with no number at all is flagged, because it is the field that causes the most trouble downstream. A missing supplier name or delivery address is flagged for the obvious reason. A line with a description but no quantity or no price is flagged, because a supplier is entitled to invoice at list price for a line you left blank. And a code that appears on two lines is flagged, since two lines for the same code should almost always be one line with a larger quantity.

None of the checks stop you printing. They are the questions an approver or a supplier asks most often, surfaced early rather than after the order has been sent.

Printing, saving and the CSV

The sheet on the right is laid out at true A4 proportions, so what you see is what comes out. Print opens your browser's own print box; choosing Save as PDF as the destination there produces a proper PDF with selectable text and no extra software. The Download PNG button beside it saves a picture of the sheet instead, which is easier to attach from a phone, and Save as text gives you the contents as plain text for pasting into an email.

Download CSV produces a file built for a system rather than for reading. Every row repeats the order number, the two dates, the supplier and account, the buyer, the currency and whether prices are net or gross, so a single row still identifies itself if it gets separated from the rest. Then come the line number, code, description, quantity, unit, unit price, tax rate and line amount.

After the lines, carriage appears as its own row, each tax band appears as a row, and the order total appears last. That means the file adds up on its own without anybody having to recreate the tax logic in a spreadsheet. Dates go out as year-month-day whatever format the sheet is set to print, because an import left to guess whether 04/08 is April or August is how an order lands in the wrong month's commitments.

Things worth getting right before you use it for real

Replace the wording in the Conditions of order box. What is there covers the ordinary points — quote the order number, mark part deliveries, invoices without a number come back, no charge appears that is not on the order — but if your organisation has its own standard purchasing conditions, those are the ones that should be printed, and they may run to a separate document you reference rather than reproduce.

Remember that an order is an offer. It becomes a contract when the supplier accepts it, which is why the sheet has an acknowledgement line for them to sign and return. For anything substantial, chase that acknowledgement; an order sent and never acknowledged is not the protection people assume it is.

Finally, be consistent with the numbering. The value of a scheme comes from every order following it. Switching from PO-{YYYY}-{0000} to something else halfway through a year, or issuing the occasional number by hand alongside the counter, produces exactly the duplicates and gaps the scheme exists to prevent.

Where your figures go

Nowhere. The order, the totals, the supplier list and the item list are all worked out and held inside the page on your own device. There is no upload, no account and no server involved, and the tool keeps working with the network disconnected once the page has loaded.

This is not a small point for this particular document. An order book is a fairly complete map of a business: who it buys from, what it pays, how much it commits and how quickly it is growing. That is commercially sensitive in a way a printable form has no business collecting. Close the tab and the working copy stays in your browser's storage on that device only, ready for you and nobody else.