Creating a purchase order

There are three ways to start a purchase order: let Stockful build one from your reorder recommendations, build one from a report while you are reading it, or create an empty one and add products yourself. They all end up on the same editor, and nothing changes your inventory until you receive stock against the order.

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From a reorder recommendation

This is the quickest route. On the Reorder recommendations page, Stockful works out the quantities from velocity, lead time and safety stock. Pick the rows you want, choose Add to purchase order, and say where they go:

• A new purchase order - the products are grouped by their primary supplier, one draft per supplier, with lines, quantities and costs pre-filled ready for you to review
• An order you already have open - the products go onto that draft with their recommended quantities. A product already on it has its quantity increased rather than appearing twice.

The same choice is offered from the Inventory list, and from any report showing products at variant level.

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From a report

Use this when you are buying off sales history rather than off a reorder point - a seasonal order, or working through one vendor at a time. The Vendor Buying List report is built for it. Every product by vendor with what sold over the period you choose, what sold over the same stretch a year ago, what is on the shelf now, and what is already on its way to you. Filter it to a vendor, sort it by whatever you are buying on, and the four numbers you need are on one line. Every row on any report showing products at variant level carries an actions menu:

• Add to purchase order - collects the row for an order. Nothing opens, so you can carry on down the list.
• View product on Shopify and View variant on Shopify - opens it in your Shopify admin. The variant link only appears on products that have real variants.

Picked products gather in a bar above the report. When you have what you want, choose Create purchase order and you get two steps:

1. How many - set the quantity for each product, with sold, sold last year, on hand and incoming still beside it so you are not working from memory. Anything left at zero is left off the order.
2. Which purchase order - start a new one, or add the products to a draft you already have open.

Starting a new order groups the products by their primary supplier, one draft per supplier, rounding quantities up to pack size and up to any minimum order quantity on the supplier’s price list. Adding to an existing draft takes your quantities as they are. A product already on that draft has its quantity increased rather than appearing on it twice.

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From scratch

Click Create purchase order on the Purchase orders page. Then:

1. Choose a supplier - select an existing supplier or create one inline. The supplier sets the order’s currency and payment terms, and unlocks that supplier’s price list for costing.
2. Set the destination - the location the stock will arrive at. You’ll need this before you can log a shipment.
3. Add products (see below).
4. Review the details and costs, then Save.

The order is saved as a Draft with a reference number assigned automatically (for example PO-1001). References aren’t editable, so every order has a unique one; you can set where the numbering starts in Purchasing settings. Drafts are otherwise fully editable and haven’t touched your stock.

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Adding products

Two ways to add line items:

• Search products to add - opens a full-screen picker of your products, one row per SKU. Search by product name, SKU, barcode or vendor, tick what you want across as many pages as you like, and press Add. Products already on the order show as ticked and can’t be added twice.
• Import - upload a CSV with a SKU or barcode column, plus optional quantity and cost. Headings are detected automatically and a template is available in the dialog. After upload, each row is checked and flagged as Ready, Not found, Duplicate, Already added, No quantity, Not tracked, Excluded or Bundle, so you can fix or untick rows before adding the rest.

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Narrowing the picker

The picker has the same filter chips as your inventory: every product filter, the stock figures, your metafields, and two of its own:

• Location - starts set to the order’s destination when it has one, so the stock figures are for the place the goods are going. Clear it for totals across all your tracked locations, or pick other locations.
• Supplier - only products on a supplier’s price list.

Use the columns button on the right of the search bar to bring in more detail: barcode, vendor, product type, status, on hand, committed, velocity, days of supply, sold in the last 30 days, last sold, inventory value, and the supplier’s SKU, pack size and whether the product is on their price list. Any column with a value can be sorted, from the same menu or by clicking its heading. Your choice of columns is remembered on this device. The cost column shows what the line will cost: the supplier’s price when the order has a supplier and the product is on their price list, otherwise the product’s cost per item.

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Picker views

Save any combination of search, filters and sorting as a view, and it appears in the selector on the left of the picker’s search bar, on every device. Useful if you raise orders often: one view per supplier, or the products you top up every month. The location chip is not part of a view, so a view saved on one order follows the destination of the next.

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What the picker leaves out

A purchase order can only carry products you track, so the picker never offers products your exclusion rules exclude, bundles (their stock lives on their components), or variants whose Track quantity is switched off in Shopify. The same rule applies to the CSV import, which names those rows instead of dropping them, and to purchase orders raised by the AI assistant or an MCP connection. For each line you set the quantity and a cost. The cost source decides where the cost comes from:

• Price list - the cost from this supplier’s price list.
• Cost per item - the cost set on the product itself.
• Custom cost - a one-off cost used for this order only.

If a product has a pack size set for the supplier, the line shows Pack of N. The arrows step a whole pack at a time, and a quantity typed by hand rounds up to the next whole pack when you leave the field - a supplier who sells in packs of 305 can’t ship 2,100 of them. Supplier terms are per supplier, so if you add products before choosing the supplier, the costs, supplier SKUs and pack sizes fill in the moment you pick one. A cost you typed yourself is kept.

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Deciding how much to order

Ordering well means knowing what you already hold and how fast it’s moving, and the line table can show you both without leaving the order. Use the columns button at the end of the supplier bar. Layout decides how much room the table gets:

• Compact - the order summary sits alongside the lines, and extra columns scroll.
• Full width - the line table takes the whole page and the summary moves below it.

Stores that installed Stockful recently start in full width; longer-standing stores keep compact, so nothing moves under you. Either way the choice is yours and it sticks. Columns you can turn on, in any order:

• Inventory - what’s available at the receiving location, across all your tracked locations, and how much is already on order. Shown by default.
• Days of stock - how long the stock at the receiving location lasts at its current rate.
• Suggested qty - what Stockful would order, the same figure as your reorder recommendations.
• Sold 30d / 60d / 90d - units sold over each period. A period reaching back further than your sales history shows a dash rather than an incomplete total, so a store that installed a month ago sees no 90-day figure until it has one.
• Sold (forecast period) - units sold over the period your forecasting reads demand from, set in forecasting settings.
• Retail price - the selling price, with the margin at this order’s cost.

Your choice of layout and columns is remembered on your own device, so it doesn’t change what anyone else on the store sees.

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Resizing the whole order

Suppliers set minimums that have nothing to do with your reorder points: a carriage-paid threshold, a pallet or container that only makes sense full, a weight band. Sometimes it is your own constraint rather than theirs, like the cash you have this week. Rather than retype every line to hit one of those, set a target and let Stockful size the order to it. On a draft order with a receiving location, open More actions and choose Resize order. Enter the days of supply you want the order to cover. Stockful works out what each line would need to be, and shows you:

• what the quantity is now and what it would become
• how long each new quantity covers, counted from when the order arrives
• the order’s total units before and after

Nothing changes until you choose Resize. Untick any line you want to leave exactly as it is, which is how you protect a quantity you set deliberately. Quantities are rounded up to a whole pack where the supplier ships in packs, the same as when you type one yourself.

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Why a line might not be listed

Only lines Stockful would change appear. A line is left out when:

• there is no demand behind it at the receiving location, so there is no forecast to size it from. Products that have never sold there are the usual case
• the answer is none, either because the line is already covered to your target or because it is a product Stockful buys to order rather than to a forecast. Resize never takes a line down to zero: removing something from an order is your call, not something a bulk change does for you
• it already matches the target

The quantities come from the same forecasting that produces your reorder recommendations, run again at the target you asked for. That means a seasonal product is resized on its seasonal demand curve rather than a flat daily average, and the usual limit on ordering far beyond what a product actually sells still applies.

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Order details

Open Purchase order details to set:

• Reference number - assigned automatically (PO-1001), editable to match your own numbering.
• Note to supplier - free text that prints on the PDF and emailed order.
• Internal note - free text only your team sees. It prints on the receiving copy and never on the supplier’s.
• Expected arrival - the overall date you expect the order. Individual shipments carry their own arrival dates.
• Supplier currency and exchange rate - when the supplier’s currency differs from your store’s, Stockful fetches the day’s rate and converts totals to your currency. The rate is editable, or enter it manually if automatic rates aren’t configured.
• Tags - find or create tags to organise your orders.

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Costs on the order

The Cost summary shows the order subtotal, any adjustments (shipping, duties, fees), taxes and the total - with a converted total in your store currency when the supplier bills in another. Adjustments are where shipping and landed-cost extras go; see costs and landed cost for how they flow into your margins.