About Purchase Orders

DropStream imports purchase orders — inbound replenishment that brings new stock into a warehouse from a supplier or vendor — applies your purchase order rules, and routes each PO to the warehouse that will receive the goods. The Purchase Orders section in the app shows every PO DropStream has imported, where it is in the receiving lifecycle, and lets you take action on individual POs or in bulk.

To open the purchase orders list, click Purchase Orders in the left sidebar, then Purchases.

What you can do with purchase orders

• Search and filter purchase orders — find POs by ID, buyer name, or SKU; filter by status, connection, sales channel, or date.
• View a purchase order — open a PO to see its line items, due date, and activity timeline.
• Edit a purchase order — change header fields and individual line items before the PO is sent to the warehouse.
• Purchase order actions — take action on a single PO from its Actions menu: reprocess, reset, archive, or delete.
• Bulk purchase order actions — select multiple POs in the list and apply the same action to all of them at once.
• Purchase order statuses — reference for what each status means.
• Set the purchase order import schedule — change how often DropStream pulls new POs from a connection, and how often it pushes status updates back.
• Manually trigger a purchase order import — run an import on demand without waiting for the schedule.

Related: Receipts

The Purchase Orders sidebar group also contains a Receipts view, which lists the notifications the warehouse emits as it physically receives and puts away the goods on each PO. DropStream uses those receipts to update the actuals against the original purchase order. See About Purchase Order Receipts for the full picture.

How purchase orders differ from sales orders

POs travel in the opposite direction of sales orders: a sales order ships goods out to an end customer, while a PO brings goods in to a warehouse from a supplier. A few practical consequences:

• POs are usually fewer and bigger — a single PO can have hundreds of line items.
• The PO model is leaner than the sales-order model. Customer-facing fields (customer_email, shipping_amount, etc.) don’t exist on POs.
• The Purchase Orders channel on a connection has two schedules: an Import schedule for new POs and a Status update schedule for pushing fulfillment status back to the source system.

For rules that act on imported POs, see Rules for Imported Purchase Orders.