Purchasing

Purchase Order Processing will handle a variety of ordering methods and order types. Purchase orders can be for stock for registered items, non-stock for standard items, or for non-registered "special" or one-off items: purchase direct for sales, for example.

Purchase Order Processing

The Purchase Order Processing module includes vendor registration, vendor-specific price lists and item coding, order entry (with a variety of ordering methods and order types), order review and progress chasing (for long delivery items), and goods receiving.

The vendor system links to the "Cross-system" facilities for recording the company name and address (including those troublesome extra-long names), and allows you to record a list of contacts and telephone numbers, fax numbers, network addresses etc. Multiple addresses can be held.

Purchase orders can be for stock for registered items, non-stock for standard items, or for non-registered "special" or one-off items: purchase direct for sales, for example. Full access to the product registration system is available from purchase order entry so that details of new items including vendor's item number can be captured - this saves you from adding too many uncoded purchases which would end up with unrecorded stock, no history of previous purchases & prices etc.

Item and Vendor Price lists can be maintained in either direction - you can key in a vendor's price list with the vendor's or manufacturers' item codes, or compare the prices for an item from different vendors and set a preference code.

Entry of prices at ordering time will in any case gradually build up a vendor's price list and a history of price changes.

Previous orders and receipts will also build up a history of delivery performance. Combined with reason codes on return transactions (rejected receipts) this will become a performance monitor for your vendors.

Exception enquiries will show overdue and expected orders.

The purchasing system has unit conversion built into it, including the flexibility to define different conversion units from different vendors - a boxful could be 50 from one supplier and 100 from another. Price units can also differ - steel for example is often bought by length but priced by weight.

Goods Receipt functions are also flexible. They allow you to receive into stock in a single step or to receive into a holding bay (quarantine stock) for inspection and approval before posting on to stock. Received items are readily identified for filling back-orders in the Sales system.

The receipt entry screens will default to showing the expected items from the purchase order, so that only items which have been omitted and extra items included will need keying by exception. Of course, for this to work you need to identify the purchase order number - and if it is not available on the delivery note there are search facilities for finding vendor codes, open orders and item codes.