Purchase Order

October 23, 2017

Overview

ChannelOnline provides a document within its interface to facilitate the ability to purchase products from a vendor or supplier. The document type responsible for this is called a Purchase Order (or PO for short) and will allow resellers to order from a supplier, track order shipments, and view serial numbers for serialized products – all of which may be visible to the end user. Purchase Orders can either be created ad hoc or created from and linked to a Sales Order in Submitted

status.This guide will explain complete process workflow for creating and managing purchases within ChannelOnline.

Term Description
Purchase Order A document used to purchase products from a supplier or vendor.
PO Abbreviation of Purchase Order
Supplier An IT pr duct wholesaler
Vendor Same as Supplier
Distributor Same as Supplier
Autofulfill The electronic submission of a purchase order to an integrated supplier.
Dropship Purchase order that ships directly to an end customer’s address (not the reseller).
Confirmation # Order number provided by the supplier once they have created it in their system.
Buyer Purchasing employee at the company using ChannelOnline
Purchasing Manager (Mgr) Purchasing employee at the company using ChannelOnline assigned to the supplier (like account managers).
Customer Info This is a page of end customer information that is needed by the supplier to process specific types of orders (like contracts or Gov/Ed).

 

A typical PO process may include the following:

  • Creation of a PO based on products in a submitted Sales Order.
  • Creation of a PO based on products from multiple submitted Sales Orders (even from multiple end customers).
  • Creation of a PO not based on any products in any existing Sales Order (ad hoc).

ChannelOnline provides you with the ability to do the following:

  • Electronically submit (when available), print, and email PO documents.
  • Browse through POs via a dedicated Purchasing tab.
  • Perform reporting against your POs. (similar to sales reporting).
  • Enable or disable user access permissions to control the creating and submission of POs.

Available PO Statuses

  • Unsubmitted, Submitted, Shipped, Delivered, Cancelled, BackOrder, OnHold

NOTE: A PO might show as Locked if it has been exported via XML API

Granting Purchase Order Access Permissions

You need to make sure that your purchasing team has the proper permissions to work with POs. By default, all PO permissions are enabled for members of the“Admin SalesRep – Buyer” and the “SalesRepBuyer” profiles. Access Rights Profiles can be found at: Admin > Personnel > Access Rights

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Supplier Settings

The creation of a PO depends in part on the settings for the supplier itself. To edit a supplier’s settings, you can go to

Admin -> Suppliers and click the name of the corresponding supplier. You can also go to the Suppliers tab, click on Supplier List, and then click the View button for the corresponding supplier.

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On the resulting page, you will be able to view various components pertaining to the supplier, such as Supplier Info,Supplier Contact Info, and Settings. Many of these will have pencil icons in the top right corner of the respective component for you to edit those details. Details that may have a direct effect on fields in a PO are payment type and delivery method. Editing the supplier contacts gives you the ability to specify a default contact whose details will be populated upon emailing the PO (which may be part of your workflow if working with manual P show on the PO include: Account #, Purchasing Manager, Credit Limit, and Handling Fee.

Lastly, you will have the ability to modify the order and location of the components as they appear on the Supplier View by

clicking on the icon in the top right corner of the Supplier View page.

Creating A Purchase Order

There are two ways to create a PO: from scratch via a supplier page, or from line items in a Sales Order (or multiple Sales Orders) in Submitted Status.

Creating a new PO from scratch

To create a new PO from scratch, go to the supplier page of the supplier you wish to create a PO for. This can be done in one of two ways: 1) By going to the Suppliers Tab, clicking Supplier List, and then clicking the View button of the corresponding supplier, or 2) by going to Admin -> Suppliers and clicking the Supplier name.

Once in the Supplier View page, you can click on Create New PO in the Supplier Actions component or Documents section.

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When you click on Create New PO, you will be presented with a new page that says Purchase Order (Unsubmitted) at the top and will have a PO number populated f r it already. This document will then be the active document (it will be selected the dropdown found in the top right corner of the ChannelOnline page), and you can then search for parts to add to it, similar to how you would a quote or sales order. (Note that because the PO is the active document, the search results and

product browsing will reflect only the availability of the supplier found on that PO).

Creating a new PO from a Sales Order

To create a new PO from a Sales Order, go to the Sales Order and place a checkmark next to the line items you wish to create a PO for. Then, select Create PO from the Create Doc options.

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NOTE: Selecting Create PO (All) is a shortcut used to create a PO for all line items in the document. Multiple POs will be created if there is more than one supplier for the items on the Sales Order.

You will then be presented with a pop up light box that will show the selected items and show a line for every Supplier for which the POs will correspond. Multiple POs will be created if the selected items from the Sales Order have differing selected Suppliers, and the list will reflect this.

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The default selected value for the dropdowns will be set to Create New PO (discussion on adding to an existing PO will be found later in this guide).Once you confirm that the corresponding items and the suppliers are correct, you can click onCreate PO(s) to create the purchase orders for those items. The resulting screen will be a page that has the most recently created POs highlighted at the top. You can click on the value in the PO # column to view a PO.

Combining items from multiple Sales Orders onto an existing PO

To combine items from different Sales Orders onto a PO, you must first create a PO from one sales order via the means outlined in the prior section (Creating a new PO from a Sales Order) until you have an unsubmitted PO. Then, you can go through the steps to create a PO for another SO. On the screen presenting you with the Create New PO dropdown menu, you will be able to select from a list of unsubmitted POs available for that same supplier.

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Links between Sales Orders and Purchase Orders

If a PO is created from line items on one or more SO, both the line items on the PO and the line items on the SO will have an icon that indicates a link is found and will show which document number it is linked to.

Sales Order View

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Purchase Order View

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Clicking on the respective icon will give you the ability to view the other document. The presence of a link also implies that shipping/tracking information and serial numbers entered into the PO will be made available on the Sales Order Automatically (that is, not needing to be entered again into that document) and is also available to the end user if necessary.

Establishing a link between Sales Orders and Purchase Orders if there is none initially

If a PO is created from scratch (that is, not a result of creation from within a Sales Order), you have the ability to add a link to an existing SO by clicking on the + icon in the Link column within a PO.
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This will bring up a search form where you can search for a Sales Order that has this same line item on it.
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Results will be in a list of Sales Orders that feature the part number in question, which you can select from to add the link.

Purchase Order Details
Difference between Autofulfill and Manual POs
There are two types of POs that ChannelOnline supports: manual and auto fulfill.
Manual POs are POs that are created in ChannelOnline but not automatically sent to the supplier for purchasing. Instead, one must send the PO to the supplier either by email as an attachment (PDF or HTML), printed and faxed, or relayed via phone. The following updates to the PO, such as switching the PO from Submitted to Shipped manually by a buyer.
Autofulfill POs are actually sent to the supplier electronically once the buyer clicks Submit on the PO. No additional email or phone call is necessary for the supplier to accept this order. The resulting updates to the PO are also automatically updated in ChannelOnline by the supplier (which will automatically update the status of line items on any linked sales orders). Only a select few suppliers support Autofulfill functionality. The list of which ones support Autofulfill POs is found at http://channelonline.com/suppliers.
Submitting a PO and updating tracking information.
Manual POs: To submit a manual PO, you can click the button at the bottom of the page that says Convert to Submitted. This will set the PO to Submitted, and many of the fields will now be in read-only status. You can then send a copy of this PO to the supplier in a number of ways by clicking Send. If you click Send, you will be presented with options for printing the PO (if you wish to fax it, for example), emailing it as an attachment, or exporting it as a PDF.
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On a manual PO in Submitted status, you have the ability to enter shipping/tracking information and serial number by clicking on the Show Serial/Shipping button.
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This will reveal fields for Status (Submitted, Shipped, Delivered, etc), Shipped On date, Carrier, Tracking Number, and Serial Numbers. Any changes to this line will also be made to the line on the corresponding Sales Order if a link is present.

 

Autofulfill POs: To submit an autofulfill PO, you must first click on the Live Cost button to get the most up to date cost and supplier availability for the lines in the PO. The Avail column will show the total quantity available across all warehouses for that supplier. From here, you will be able to specify a specific warehouse or go with the selection of BestWarehouse for a line.Then, you can click the button at the bottom of the page that says Submit PO.This will send the details of the PO over to the supplier electronically via XML and may take a few moments to complete.

Once it is done, if successful, the status of the PO will now say (Submitted), and many of the fields will be read-only.There will be a button for Show Serial/Shipping which can be used to show fields related to the current status of the line annualPO, are not able to be edited.Note that these fields, unlike with a manual PO, are not able to be edited.Instead, they are automatically populated by the supplier as those updates are available. Any changes to this line will also be made avail corresponding Sales Order if a link is present items.

Gov/Edu and License type orders

You may encounter certain products that have multiple supplier entries from the same supplier where some of the entries may have special pricing based on government subject to some additional limitations:

  • End User information may need to be entered (see the next section on End User Information).
  • Non gov/edu parts and gov/edu parts may need to appear on separate POs. If this is the case, different POs will be specified automatically at the PO creation stage.

End Customer Information

For certain types of SKUs, such as licenses or anything requiring activation, End Customer information is able to be added to POs using the Customer Info link.

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Purchase Order Reports

You can run reports on your Purchase Order history by going to Reports -> Purchasing under Control Panel.

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Reports can accept a number of various parameters, such as a specific date range, status, or purchaser (rep selected on the PO). You can also run reports on POs based on the presence of a specific manufacturer part number. In addition to the filters, you also have some control over the columns included in the results and can add values such as SO link or confirmation number. Lastly, you have the ability to save the report to run in the future or export it to tsv, csv, xls, or xlsx.