Purchase Orders and Suppliers: Restock Your Inventory

Overview

Catalog → Suppliers is your list of vendors. Catalog → Purchase orders is where you order stock from them and receive it when it arrives, so your stock levels stay right.

Purchasing and suppliers are on the Growth plan and above.

Step 1: Add your suppliers

Go to Catalog → Suppliers and click Add supplier. Enter the supplier's name, contact email, phone, country and Lead time (days), the time they usually take to deliver. Notes is for payment terms or anything else worth keeping.

To change a supplier, click Edit on its row, or Edit in its details. Every field of the Add supplier form can be changed, and a box you empty is cleared. Deactivate keeps a supplier on the list without it being active; Delete supplier, in its details, removes it.

Link the products each supplier provides

A restock suggestion can only name a supplier if the product is linked to one. There are two places to do it, and they change the same link:

• On the supplier. Open a supplier with Details (or click the number in its Products column). Under Products this supplier provides, type part of a product's name or SKU in Add a product and pick it from the list. Each linked product shows its stock and reorder point; enter the supplier's unit cost in your store's currency, and leave it blank if you don't know it yet. Click the cross to unlink a product.
• On the product. In the product editor, under the reorder thresholds, Supplied by lists the suppliers linked to this product with their unit cost and lead time. Choose a supplier in Add a supplier, enter a unit cost if you have one, and click Add.

A product can come from several suppliers. One of them is its usual supplier: the first supplier you link becomes it, and Make usual supplier (or Make usual in the product editor) moves it. Restock suggestions go to the usual supplier. If the usual supplier is deactivated, they go to the active supplier with the lowest unit cost instead. Lead time is the supplier's own, from its Lead time (days).

Supplier ratings

Rating is your own score for the supplier, from one to five stars; leave it empty for not rated. Set it when you add the supplier and change it any time with Edit; Clear next to the stars sets it back to not rated. It shows in the supplier list and on the supplier's details. It is for you only: suppliers never see it.

Step 2: Raise a purchase order

1. Go to Catalog → Purchase orders and click New PO.
2. Enter the supplier's name and email, and an Expected delivery date if you have one. If your store has more than one location, choose the Receiving location the goods will arrive at; leave it on the default and they arrive at your default location.
3. Add a line for each product: the product, its SKU, the quantity and your cost. Under Stock item, search for the product in your catalogue (and pick its variant, if it has variants). Only lines tied to a stock item are added to your stock when you receive them; a line without one is recorded on the order only.
4. Click Create PO. It starts as a draft.

Restock suggestions

Auto-restock looks for products at or below their reorder point and suggests a quantity for each. Each suggestion names the product's usual supplier and their lead time, and prices the line at that supplier's unit cost. A product with no supplier linked says so, with a link to Suppliers.

Pick the ones you want and click Create POs. You get one draft order per supplier, holding every selected product that supplier provides, already addressed to the supplier's email. A product with no supplier gets a draft of its own addressed to "To be assigned", with no email address, so link a supplier before you raise it if you want the order to go to one. A product only appears here if its reorder point is set.

The restock suggestions in Assistants work the same way: a suggested order names the usual supplier and uses their unit cost.

Step 3: Send and confirm

• Send to supplier marks the order as sent and emails it to the supplier's address. If the email cannot be sent, the order is still marked sent and the page tells you.
• Mark confirmed records that the supplier has accepted it.

Step 4: Receive the stock

When the delivery arrives, click Mark received. Receive stock lets you enter how many of each line arrived; a partial delivery can be received now and the rest later, and an order never receives more than was ordered. For products tracked by lot or batch, scan or type the Lot / batch code as you receive. The received quantities are added to your stock.

On a store with more than one location, Receive into at the top of the dialog says where the goods arrived, and you can change it there. With no location chosen, a product you already keep in locations is received into your default location, and the store-wide count always stays the sum of your locations.

Supplier returns

To send faulty stock back and track the credit you are owed, use Catalog → Supplier returns. Tie each line to its Stock item (and variant) so sending the return takes it out of your stock; on a store with several locations, choose where the goods are Leaving from, or they leave your default location. If that location does not hold enough, the return is refused with how many are there.