Searching and managing purchase orders

SECURITY  Users with Inventory object permissions to add/edit and delete purchase orders

NAVIGATION   > Inventory > Procurement & Delivery > Purchase Orders

About purchase orders

A purchase order is a document a buyer sends to one specific vendor to order a quantity of specified goods and services at a specified price. When the vendor accepts the purchase order, it constitutes a contract to supply the items at the specified price. This document also helps the vendor to collect the money owed.

While the purchase order is addressed to one specific vendor, it can contain items for one or for several customers, as well as items you plan to put into inventory. To open the page, use the path(s) in the Security and navigation section above.

  • To display a list of all records of a given entity in your Autotask instance, click Search without applying any filters.

Search results containing more than 25, 50, or 100 records (depending on your Records per page setting) are paginated. Use page navigation to view additional results. At most, 5,000 data record will be retrieved at any one time.

The Active filter defaults to Active on the Organization Search, Contact Search, My Organizations, and My Contacts pages, as well as on the global Search by Organization, Contact (First Name), Contact (Last Name), and Contact (Email). The counters in the My menu also reflect only active entities.

NOTE  There are several options for phone number filters. The Phone filter will look for a contains match that includes any characters (such as - or () ) entered in the filter box. The Organization Search and Contact Search pages have a Phone (numbers only) option that will ignore special characters in the filter and the results. It will do a contains search for just the numbers entered in the filter box. The Contact Search page also allows you to do a Phone (Starts With) search. It will search for phone numbers that start with the value entered in the filter box.

The following tool buttons appear above the results list:

Tool Button Description

Many Search pages (but not the widget drill-down tables) allow you to create a new instance of the selected entity. This button is visible before you execute a search:

  • Click New.
  • Contract, Ticket, and Project entities allow you to create several different entity types. Click New and select an option.

For help with populating the fields, refer to the context-sensitive Help of the page that opens.

NOTE  This button is only displayed for users with security levels that include permission to Manually Add Items to Purchase Orders.

SECURITY  By default, Export is available to users with Admin security level and disabled for all others. It can be enabled for other security levels. Refer to Can export Grid Data.

NOTE  When exporting to CSV: To ensure consistent date/time formatting in the CSV output, we strongly recommend that the user’s date/time format settings in Autotask be identical to the Windows date/time format settings of the computer performing the export. This will prevent conflicts in how the software that generates the report interprets the date/time format.

  1. Click the Export as CSV icon.
  2. A window opens that allows you to download and open the exported file.

NOTE  Note that only the selected columns of the first 5,000 records will be exported.

IMPORTANT  The export file does not contain all fields that are required to re-import the data using the data import templates, and the data headers do not match.

The Column Chooser allows you to customize search results tables throughout Autotask. It determines the following:

  • Which columns are displayed on the table
  • The left-to-right display order of the columns

NOTE   Column Chooser settings on search results tables and some standard reports are part of the user settings stored on the Autotask server. You can log in from any computer and have your column chooser settings applied to your Autotask session. To clear the data stored in your Autotask instance and reset the column chooser settings to the Autotask default settings, click Reset Settings in My >  Miscellaneous > Settings.

To customize the table, do the following:

  1. Click the column chooser icon above the search results. The Column Chooser page opens.

Columns appear either in the Available Columns or the Selected Columns panel.

  1. Double-click a column name or select one or multiple columns and click the left or right arrow to move columns to the other panel.
  2. To change the display order of the columns, select one or multiple columns in the Selected Columns panel and click the up or down arrows.

NOTE  Top-to-bottom order in the Selected Columns list becomes left-to-right order on the Search Results list.

  1. Click Save & Close.

NOTE  If the characters + # appear after the column name, then that column may have multiple items returned for some rows. If that occurs, the first item will appear in the row followed by + and the number of additional items returned. To display the list of additional items, hover over the item in the column.

Click the refresh icon to execute the search on the current table again, using the same search criteria to find new records that were added since you first performed the search.

Menu Option Description Available if Status is
General New Submitted Received Partial Received Full Canceled
Edit Purchase Order Edit or delete items listed on a purchase order that has not yet been submitted. Refer to Adding or editing a purchase order.
(PO properties, not PO items)
Submit Purchase Order Submit purchase orders that have a status New or Canceled. Refer to Saving and submitting the purchase order.      
Receive / Cancel Receipt of Purchase Order Process purchase orders as items are received. Refer to Receiving or canceling receipt of purchase order items.  
(cancel receipt)		  
View / Print Purchase Order You can open a print quality view of the purchase order from the right-click menu of the Purchase Order and Purchase Order History tables. You can print or email this view. Refer to Viewing, printing, or emailing a purchase order.
Email Purchase Order This menu option opens a notification page that allows you to Refer to Email a purchase order.
Cancel Purchase Order When you cancel a purchase order with a status of New or Submitted, the status changes to Canceled.
You cannot cancel a purchase order after purchase order items have been received. Once canceled, you cannot edit, receive, or submit the PO. You can still open the print view of a canceled PO and delete the PO, but the cancellation cannot be undone.		      
Delete Purchase Order

When you delete a purchase order, it is removed from your Autotask instance and no record remains. You can only delete a purchase order when the status is New, Submitted, or Canceled. If items have been received against a canceled PO, you will not able to delete it.

Deletion cannot be undone.

    

QuickBooks (Web Connector)

 New Submitted Received Partial Received Full Canceled

Set as Ready to Transfer to QuickBooks

This section is only visible if the new QuickBooks integration is enabled.

The menu items are active for approved expense reports. Manager security level is required.

Timesheets that are set to "Ready..." will be transferred the next time the Web Connector is run.

 

Set as Not Ready to Transfer to QuickBooks