Creating & Managing Purchase Orders

A Purchase Order (PO) is the document you send a vendor to order goods or services — spare parts, new stock, a repair job. Rentablez lets you build a PO with itemized lines, email it straight to the vendor, download it as a PDF, and follow it from draft all the way to closed. Everything lives in the Vendor Management module, right alongside the bills and payments those POs turn into.

Purchase Orders live under Vendor Management → Purchase Orders (/vendor-management/purchase-orders). This module is separate from the vendor directory in Settings. You need the vendors.read permission to view POs and vendors.write to create, edit, send, or close them. Vendors themselves are created in Settings — see How to Manage Vendors?.

Why Use Purchase Orders?

• A paper trail — every order to a vendor is recorded, numbered, and searchable.
• Fewer surprises — capture agreed quantities, prices, tax, and delivery dates up front.
• A clean handoff to billing — once goods arrive, you can raise the matching vendor invoice against the PO.

Creating a Purchase Order

Step 1 — Open the Purchase Orders tab

Go to Vendor Management and click the Purchase Orders tab. Click + New PO in the top-right to open the create form.

Don’t see the + New PO button? You have read-only access. Ask an administrator for the vendors.write permission.

Step 2 — Fill in the header

The PO number is generated for you automatically once the order is saved — there’s no field to type it in.

Step 3 — Add line items

Each PO has one or more lines. For every line, enter:

• Description — what you’re ordering (required on every line).
• Qty — the quantity.
• Unit Price — the price per unit.
• Tax % — the tax rate for that line, from 0 to 100.

The Total column updates live for each line, and the Grand Total at the bottom sums every line plus its tax. Use Add Line to add more rows, and the trash icon to remove a row.

Step 4 — Save

Click Create. The new PO is saved as a Draft and appears at the top of the list. To make changes later, see Editing a Draft below.

The PO Status Workflow

Every purchase order moves through four statuses in order. You advance it one step at a time using the status button in the Actions column.

The workflow is one-directional:

Draft → Sent → Received → Closed

The action button always shows the next status — click SENT on a draft to mark it sent, then RECEIVED, then CLOSED. Once a PO is Closed, there is no further step.

Emailing & Downloading a PO

Two actions are available on every PO in the list:

• Download — saves the purchase order as a PDF file named after its PO number.
• Email to vendor — sends the PO straight to the vendor’s email address.

The Email action only appears when the selected vendor has an email address on file (and you have vendors.write). If you don’t see the email button, add an email to the vendor’s record in Settings → Vendors.

Editing a Draft

You can edit a purchase order only while it is in Draft status. Click the pencil (Edit) icon on a draft row to reopen the form and change any header field or line item. Once a PO is advanced to Sent, the edit option is no longer available — the order is locked to preserve the record you issued to the vendor.

Finding a Purchase Order

The Purchase Orders list supports server-side search and filtering:

• Search by PO number using the search box.
• Filters (click the filter icon) let you narrow by Vendor, Status (Draft, Sent, Received, Closed), and an Order From / Order To date range.
• Use Clear to reset all filters at once.

From PO to Bill

A purchase order records what you ordered; a vendor invoice records what you were billed. When the vendor’s bill arrives, raise a vendor invoice and link it back to this PO so your payables stay tied to the original order. See Recording Vendor Invoices & Payments.

Related Articles

• Vendor Management Overview
• Recording Vendor Invoices & Payments
• Payables Aging & Vendor Statements
• How to Manage Vendors?