Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Purchase Orders, or POs as we tend to call them day to day.

So what is a Purchase Order? At its core, a Purchase Order is a formal order you send to a supplier. It’s the document that kicks off the buying process on your end. Once a PO is in play, it does two important things downstream. First, it triggers the goods reception process, so when your delivery arrives you have something to match it against. Second, once that delivery happens, it generates the supplier invoice for you automatically. That tight link between ordering, receiving, and invoicing is what makes Purchase Orders such a central piece of the procurement workflow in Dolibarr.

Now let’s talk about the lifecycle of a Purchase Order, because understanding where a PO sits at any given moment tells you exactly what can and can’t happen next. The wiki shows this as a flow through six stages, so let me walk you through each one.

It starts as a Draft. This is your working document. Nothing has been committed yet. You’re pulling together the supplier, the line items, quantities, prices. Think of it as your scratchpad before anything official happens.

From Draft, a PO moves to Approved. This is where a sign-off happens. Depending on how your approval workflow is configured, this might happen automatically for low-value orders or it might require a manager to manually approve it when the order value crosses a certain threshold. More on that in a moment.

Once approved, the PO moves to Sent. This means the order has gone out to the supplier. They know what you want and when you want it.

Here’s where it gets interesting. When goods start arriving, the PO can enter a Partially Received state. Not everything has to arrive at once. If your supplier sends you half the order today and the rest comes next week, Dolibarr handles that gracefully. You receive what arrived, and the system keeps track of what’s still outstanding. That outstanding portion becomes a back-order that stays on the PO until it’s fulfilled.

Once everything has arrived, the PO moves to Fully Received. That’s your confirmation that everything you ordered has come through the door.

And finally, the last stage is Invoiced. At this point the supplier invoice has been generated and the financial side of things is locked in.

So that’s the six stages: Draft, Approved, Sent, Partially Received, Fully Received, and Invoiced. Each stage is a checkpoint that keeps your procurement process structured and auditable.

Now let’s look at the key features that make Purchase Orders in Dolibarr genuinely useful.

First up is multi-currency support. If you’re buying from international suppliers, you can raise a PO in the supplier’s currency. You don’t have to manually convert everything back to your home currency before you enter it. The system handles that.

Second is the approval workflow, and this one is worth pausing on. You can configure thresholds so that smaller orders go through automatically while larger ones require explicit approval before they move forward. This gives you financial controls without creating unnecessary friction for routine purchases.

Third is partial reception and back-order tracking. You already heard this touched on in the lifecycle walkthrough. The point is that you don’t have to wait for a complete delivery to start processing what’s arrived. You can receive in stages, and the system keeps a running tally of what’s still due. That’s especially handy when you’re dealing with suppliers who ship in batches or when lead times are unpredictable.

Fourth is automatic stock updates on reception. When you mark goods as received against a PO, your stock levels update automatically. You don’t have to go into a separate stock module and manually adjust quantities. The reception event does that work for you in the background. This keeps your inventory accurate in real time.

Those four features together mean that a Purchase Order isn’t just a piece of paperwork. It’s a live document that drives actions across multiple parts of the system.

Finally, it’s worth knowing how Purchase Orders connect to other areas of Dolibarr. When goods arrive, that flows into Delivery and Reception. Once the PO is fully or partially received, it ties into Supplier Invoices and Credit Notes, which is where the financial reconciliation happens. And as we just mentioned, the reception event feeds directly into Stock. So if you’re working in any of those areas and something looks off, it’s often worth tracing back to the originating Purchase Order to understand where things stand.

That’s the full picture of Purchase Orders in Dolibarr. From raising a draft all the way through to invoicing, the PO is the thread that connects your supplier relationship to your internal receiving and financial processes.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.