Purchasing

The Purchasing drop-down menu in the workbench toolbar covers the buying side of your business: the vendors you buy from, the purchase orders you send them, what arrives, and what you are billed for. The four items in the menu are described below.

Purchasing is the mirror of Sales. A purchase order is an order seen from the other side, a receiver is a shipment arriving instead of leaving, and a vendor bill is an invoice you receive rather than send. If you already know the Sales screens, these will look familiar on purpose.

Purchase Order Entry

Purchasing is a paid feature called Purchase Order Entry. Every company can raise five purchase orders before subscribing, so you can run the whole workflow — order, receive, bill — on real data and see what it does before deciding.

The five are fully functional purchase orders: they print, they email, they receive stock and they bill. Only raising a sixth is withheld. Nothing you have already entered is hidden or removed if you decide not to subscribe.

Bought separately from Order Entry. Purchase Order Entry is its own subscription item, not an addition to the sales one. A company that buys through Backbone and invoices from its accounting package can subscribe to purchasing alone, and turning Order Entry off leaves purchasing running.

Managing your subscription →

Vendors

Opens the Vendor List, which shows every vendor on record. From here you can add vendors, open one to edit its address and terms, manage the parts that vendor supplies, and link vendors to QuickBooks.

Vendors details →

Open POs

Opens the Open Purchase Orders List, which shows every purchase order that has not been closed. Use it to see what is on order and what is still outstanding with each vendor.

Printing purchase orders from the list

Purchase orders print straight from the Open POs list, without opening each one:

Select one or more purchase orders (hold Ctrl / Cmd or Shift to select several).
Click Print in the list's title bar. It prints your default purchase order form.
To print a different form, click the small arrow beside Print and pick one of your company's published forms — the same chooser the purchase order screen has, sharing the same remembered default.

Several purchase orders, one print job: when more than one is selected, each form is generated and combined into a single PDF, so you get one print dialog and one collated stack, in the order you selected them.

Purchase Orders details →

Open Receivers

Opens the Open Receivers List — deliveries that have been recorded but not yet filed away. A receiver is how goods arriving against a purchase order get counted in.

Locking a receiver brings the goods into stock. Adding lines and correcting quantities change nothing on hand; only locking does. See Receivers for what that means and how to correct a mistake.

Receivers details →

Open Bills

Opens the Open Vendor Bills List, which shows bills that have not been paid. Bills can be exported to QuickBooks as accounts payable, and read back so a bill settled in QuickBooks closes here too.

Vendor Bills details →

Purchasing Reports

The Reports menu carries six purchasing reports alongside the sales ones: Purchase Orders, Receivers and Vendor Bills, each with a line-item companion. They group, sort and export to spreadsheets the same way, and unlike the Open lists they cover closed records too.

Reports details →

Printing Your Own Purchase Order

Purchase orders print a standard document, and can print your company's own version instead. Forms are designed in plain English on the Print Forms tab and published for the whole company.

Only purchase orders have a form. Receivers and vendor bills do not, and deliberately so: the document that matters for those is the vendor's own packing slip or invoice, which you attach to the record rather than generate from it.

Designing and publishing print forms →

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