Purchasing Overview

Purchasing supports your company in managing its expenditures and reimbursing vendors promptly for services or goods provided. Through purchasing, you create purchase requisitions for requesting items or services. Once an authorized employee in your company approves the requisition, it becomes a purchase order. Your company can use the purchase order to authorize payments and ensure that the correct items are received.

Purchasing Functionality

Using Purchasing, you can enter, generate, monitor, and receive purchase orders to improve material movement and inventory level management.
A vendor contract function allows you to store and track information about a particular item from a specific vendor. You can also store and track vendor item pricing.
You can also access vendor performance information, vendor interactions, and a listing of vendor information for items purchased regularly. In this manner, you can ensure that you have selected the best vendor for each purchase.
You can set up parameters to set default values for purchase orders, including tolerance factors for purchase order receiving and vouchers.
Purchasing also allows you to view the planned costs, actual unit costs, promise dates, and due dates for each line item.
Using the payment hold feature within Purchasing, you can place vendors on payment hold if their goods or services are unacceptable.
Because a purchase order represents a contract with a vendor, Purchasing provides you with a utility for changing purchase orders and tracking the changes you make.
Purchasing also includes the Purchase Order Receiving form, through which you enter whether you are receiving a whole/partial order or a whole/partial line/release.
Using the Master Buy Agreement option and the Purchase Order Builder form, you can group like items from POs at different sites in order to get the best quantity cost breaks.
You can use the Purchase Orders Quick Entry form to quickly create, view, and maintain purchase orders.

Purchasing Interfaces

Purchasing eliminates redundant transaction entries by interacting with the following areas of the system:

Interface	Description
Customer - Order Entry	You can create a purchase order to satisfy a customer order line item requirement.
Material - Inventory	When you create a purchase order, the system uses information from the Items form.
Material - Planning	You can create purchase orders to satisfy material planning purchase requirements.
Production	You can create a purchase order to satisfy a job material requirement.
Finance - General Ledger	The Purchase Order Ledger Distribution journal within General Ledger tracks the material transaction costs created in Purchasing.
Finance - Accounts Payable	You can generate Accounts Payable vouchers and adjustments from within Purchasing.
Data Collection	Purchasing posts the PO receiving and return transactions provided from a data collection solution.