Edit a Purchase Order

If a purchase order has not yet been placed, any person with manager permissions can open and edit the PO. Once the order has been placed, only users with approver permissions are able to make edits. This is designed to prevent users from making changes that they do not have financial authority to make. Users with approver permissions can edit a purchase order directly while in placed status, without rolling it back. In order for a user without approver permission to edit a placed PO, the approver must press the "Rollback" button, which will move the PO back to pending status. It can then be edited by any manager or admin. Once the editing is complete, the approver will have to place the order again.

Similarly, POs can only be deleted if their status is pending. In order to delete a placed PO, the approver must first roll it back to pending. At that point, the delete option will become available.

Edit Header Information

POs can be edited after creation by going to the PO view page and pressing "Edit Order."

If you have permission to edit the PO (see section on edit permissions below), this button will bring you back to the PO add items page, where you can edit any item or adjustment. Pressing the back button will bring you to the header page, where you can edit payment terms and payment method.

Certain header fields cannot be edited if there are lines on the PO. If you need to edit the destination, vendor, or code on the PO, you will have to either delete all lines from the PO before making the change, or delete the PO and create a new one.

Edit items on a purchase order

After you click “edit order” and open the add items page, you can see your edit options for a given line by clicking the actions menu on the far right. If a line is not yet shipped or invoiced (more on that below), you will see three options: Edit, Delete, and Cancel.

If you choose the delete option, you will receive a notification asking if you mean to delete the line. When you press “Yes,” that lines will be removed from the PO forever.

If you want to remove a line from a PO, but you don’t want to erase the data, you can choose the cancel option. Choosing cancel will change the line to red, and will hide all of the associated information, so that this line does not appear on the PO printout or summary, and is not available to ship or invoice. If you want to reverse the cancellation of a line, you can click the “uncancel” button in the actions menu. The line will be restored as it was before.

The third option in the actions menu is the edit button. Clicking on this will bring up a modal with all of the information for that PO line.

In this modal, you can change the product source (including creating an new product source by selecting the “create new” option in the dropdown), the quantity, UOM, unit price, recipient, quoted ship date, or budget code. The total value of the line will be automatically updated if you change the unit cost or quantity. You will notice there is also anew field called “Current Expected Ship Date.” You can use this field to track the difference between a vendor’s quoted delivery dates and any updated shipping information they provide. That way, users can see the most accurate ship date, but the quoted ship date is preserved for use in vendor metrics.

Once you have updated the fields you need to edit, press save. This will update the PO line, and you can either edit another line or exit the PO.

Edit adjustments on a purchase order

To edit an order adjustment, go to the add adjustments tab in the edit line screen. On the far right, you will see an actions menu with the exact same options as the item action menu: delete, edit, and cancel. These actions work the same for order adjustments as for order items. You can change any aspect of the order adjustment by updating the field in the edit modal. On save, your changes will be saved, and you can make additional updates or edit the PO.

What if I don’t see some or all of the options described above???

The edit options available to you will be limited based on where the purchase line is in the shipping and invoicing process. Lines that have no associated shipments or invoices have no restrictions on editing. However, once a line is partially shipped or partially invoiced, some editing options are disabled to prevent you from entering bad data. See below a breakdown of the editable fields for items in each stage of the process:

• Items or adjustments on a pending PO - all edit options described above available, and editing does not require approver permissions
• Items or adjustments on a placed PO with no shipments or invoices - all edit options described above are available, but only for users with approver permission
• Items or adjustments that have been prepaid - all edit options available for approvers, but the PO itself cannot be cancelled or deleted if any lines have been prepaid
• Items in a shipment - Items with any quantity in a shipment (even if it is still pending) cannot be deleted or cancelled. The unit of measure fields cannot be edited, and the quantity cannot be lowered below the quantity in shipments. For example, if I order 10 basketballs, and 4 basketballs have been shipped, I can increase the quantity of the order to 11, or lower it to 4, but I cannot lower it to 3 because that would mean I ordered fewer balls than I shipped. Users with approver permission can edit all other fields.
• Items or adjustments in an invoice - Items with any quantity in an invoice (even if it is still pending) cannot be deleted or cancelled. Like shipped items, the unit of measure field cannot be edited, and the quantity cannot be lowered below the quantity in shipments or invoices. The unit price and budget code information also cannot be edited to prevent conflicts with the invoice. Users with approver permission can edit all other fields on the item. Adjustments that have been invoiced cannot be edited in any way.

You can check the status of a PO line in one of two ways:

1. If the shipment or invoice has been posted, then they quantity will appear as shipped or invoice on the item status tab of the PO view page. In the screenshot below, it shows that these items in this PO have been shipped, but no quantities have yet been received or invoiced. You can see the invoice status of adjustments on the adjustments tab.

2. If the shipment or invoice is still pending, the quantities in the pending transaction will not show as shipped or invoiced. However, you can see pending shipments in the shipments tab, and pending invoices in the invoices tab. If any of the pending shipments were created in error, you can click through to the shipment to remove items or delete the shipment altogether. Pending invoices can also be modified or deleted, but only by users with invoicing permission.

Edit items on a purchase order - via import

OpenBoxes allows for certain fields on a PO to be edited via import. If you are making mass edits to the unit price, budget code, source code, recipient, estimated ready date or actual ready date fields, use the method below. All other fields must be edited one by one within the UI.

1. Go to your PO and click "Edit order"
2. Once on the item edit page, click "Export Items"

This will download an excel file with all of the information in the PO.

3. Update the fields you want to edit

• Source code - put in the new code corresponding to the sourcing information you want to add. You do not need to update the supplier code, manufacturer, source name, or manufacturer code. Those will all be pulled from the source code.
• Recipient - Put the recipient's full name into the cell. It must exactly match the person record in OpenBoxes for the import to work
• Estimated Ready Date - Overwrite the field with a new date in short date (mm/dd/yyyy) format.
• Actual Ready Date - Overwrite the field with a new date in short date (mm/dd/yyyy) format.
• Unit Price - Overwrite the field with the new Unit price.  
• Budget Code - Overwrite the field with the new Budget code. 
• Other fields cannot be edited via import - changing them will result in the import failing

4. Fix data mismatches in template - this import is a new feature and unfortunately there are some formatting issues that you will need to address before the import will work

• Some of the quantities in the export will be in general format while others will be in number format. You need to reformat the column as general before importing
• If the source code field is blank for any line, the export will show the word "null” in the source code column. Delete the nulls in this field before importing
• If OpenBoxes displays an error stating that the Supplier Code cannot be changed, change the field to "Number" format. This will retain the decimals (for example: 33050.0 instead of 33050).

5. In OpenBoxes, press "import template,” choose your file, and press open

6. You should get a message that the data has been updated. If you get an error, refer back to the instructions above. You may have forgotten to reformat a particular column.

7. Go to the view page to check your work - you should see the new values on the item details tab