Inventory Planner Essentials lets you efficiently manage your purchase orders from their creation though to receiving inventory. After using the Purchase screen to create a new purchase order, you can view, edit, email and then receive inventory against it. You can also use the POs screen to keep on top of what’s on order.

Here are some tips on how to further improve your purchasing workflows.

Consider a PO approval process, where you set a PO to the "Draft" status until it's ready to be approved. The inventory items included on "Draft" orders aren't included in the "On order" figure in the Purchase screen, so you might want to keep orders in this status until you're ready to send them to your vendor, or until the vendor has committed to fulfilling the order.

When you first create a purchase order, it's assigned a status of "Open". Use the "Move to draft" action to change its status. You can then use the Status filter in the POs screen to see all POs that need approval.

Learn more about changing statuses on purchase orders here.

If you use Inventory Planner Essentials to email your POs to vendors, you’ll benefit from the ability to easily keep track of which ones have been sent and when.

Use the "Email not sent" view in the POs screen to instantly see any orders that haven’t been emailed.

When you’re in the POs screen, you can also see if any emails had errors or were undelivered by checking the "Details" column. Learn more about using the POs screen here.

When viewing the order itself, you can navigate to Emails under the Actions menu to get more information on each email, such as when and to whom it was sent, and any errors in delivering the message.

You can continue to make edits to purchase orders even after they've been emailed and inventory has been received. If a purchase order had a mistake or needs to be changed, you can make the adjustments and resend it to your vendor.

These changes will also be tracked in the History page under the Actions menu when viewing a PO, so you can check back to see who made the change and when.

When inventory arrives, you can receive it directly in Inventory Planner Essentials, then sync it to Shopify when you’re ready to make it available in your online store. Learn more about receiving inventory here.

Receiving inventory updates the order status to "Partially received" or "Complete", depending on whether any stock is outstanding.

You can also see any POs where received inventory hasn’t yet synced to Shopify by using the "Needs inventory update" view in the POs screen. Learn more about views on the POs screen here.

You can see at a glance which POs have reached their expected date without having been fully received using the "Past due" view in the POs screen, or by checking the warning icon in the Details column. Learn more about views on the POs screen here.

It’s important to keep the Expected date up to date so that the view and warnings are accurate, but also so your To order recommendations correctly account for any stock arriving during the planning period.
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