Using CloudBridal
Purchase Orders
Vendor purchase orders are a great way to handle the transition of the customer order lifecycle from New > Ordered > Arrived. To begin tracking your purchase orders, you will need to navigate to the Purchase Orders page in the side menu.
A purchase order can only be created for customer orders in the New status, so before creating purchase orders, make sure you have at least one of those for a particular vendor. When you click the New Purchase Order button, you will be prompted to select a vendor with which you want to make a purchase order. After selecting a vendor, you will be presented with an interface that collects the following data:
- Vendor: The vendor that you want to order from.
- Status: The order's status. This begins in the Draft state, which indicates that the order has not been placed yet. The order can then be transitioned to Ordered, Arrived, Cancelled, or Other.
- Reference Number: The reference number provided by the vendor.
- Internal Notes: Any notes that you need to keep in mind.
- Notes to Vendor: Any notes that you wish the vendor to see if you decide to print or email the purchase order.
- Customer Orders: You must select one or more customer orders to put into a purchase order.
- Price/Tax: The price and tax fields will automatically populate based on your customer order selections as the sum of their wholesale prices.A sample purchase order in the Draft status.
When the purchase order is created, you have the option to print or email it through the Print Purchase Order button at the top right. This button opens a dropdown that allows you to select between Personal Records and Send to Vendor.
- Personal Records: The purchase order will include information about customers, their event dates, and other internal details.
- Send to Vendor: The purchase order only includes information that the vendor would need.
Viewing Your Purchase Orders
After creating your first purchase order, you will see it in the Draft group on the Purchase Orders page. This page groups together purchase orders based on their statuses, so that you have some indication of what state each of your purchase orders is in at any given time.The purchase orders page, displaying the current Draft purchase orders.
Transitioning the Purchase Order Status
After you actually place the purchase order with the vendor, you should change the status of it to Ordered. When you do this, you will see 2 new fields visible in the purchase order:
- Ordered Date: The date that you placed the purchase order, defaults to the current date.
- Expected Arrival Date: The date when the purchase order is expected to arrive.
You can set these fields as you please, and then when you click the Save button it will automatically update each customer's order to the Ordered status, and will also populate the customer order dates according to what you selected for the purchase order. This is a very important thing to understand about purchase orders: customer orders are intrinsically tied to their purchase order.
When the purchase order arrives from the vendor, you can now change the status to Arrived. Similar to the previous transition, this transition to Arrived will display a new field: Actual Arrival Date, which defaults to the current date. And in the same way as before, saving the purchase order will once again update the customer orders.
Other Places to View Purchase Orders
A purchase order can conveniently be viewed in two other places within CloudBridal:
- Through the customer's order by clicking the View Purchase Order button.
- Through the vendor details by clicking the black box icon in the list of vendors. This will open the purchase order history for that vendor.