Business Unit Category
Add an email signature
Coding Restrictions
Create new Business Unit
Custom Fields on Line Items
Customised labels
Date formating
Default delivery address
Division Management
Editing Email Templates
How to hide cost codes
Invoice email forwarding – Microsoft 365
SMTP & Email Sending
T&C on your PO Template
Invoice Processing Help Category
Auto reject supplier invoices
Auto rejecting of invoices issue
Finding an order or invoice
How to create a credit note
Invoice email forwarding – Microsoft 365
Invoice export colours
Invoice Inbox
Invoice List View
Invoice matching
Invoice Processing Explained
Month end cut offs
Negative Order Balance
Setting up Autopilot
Supplier Matching
Waiting for a GRN
Purchase Orders Category
Adding a product to an order
Adding documents to an order
Bulk importing orders
Close Orders Automatically
Closing an order
Copy PO to Buyer
Creating a Purchase Order
Deleting a PO
Duplicate Order Prevention
Editing an order
Finding an order or invoice
GRN an order
Grouped Purchase Orders
Import Line Items
Negative Order Balance
PO Template Editing
Purchase Order Numbering
Purchase Order PDF
Purchase Order Prefix
Purchase Requisition Number
Quick Create a Purchase Order
Send PO to Supplier
Supplier order acceptance
What is a purchase order?
Normally a user of Zahara has the purchase order number generated as soon as the order is raised. An order is raised and sent for approval and the supplier can then receive a purchase order PDF with this number on it. The number is instantly visible to the originator, as soon as the request is submitted. For the vast majority of our users, this is perfectly adequate and presents very few issues.
Some have stated though that it would be better if the number – the order number – that is sent to the supplier, isn’t known to the originator until the order is approved. This prevents the originator from circumventing the approval process and phoning the order number through to the supplier. We have listened to this feedback and provided a solution in the second ref counter.
A new, separate sequential number range can now be generated and populated into the second ref field and provided to the supplier on the purchase order PDF. This means the originator will never know the actual purchase order number until its generated and issued.
Enable the second ref field in Business Settings > Purchase Orders:
Switch this On.
Now switch on the counter and set a start number. In the above screen, 9000 will be our starting sequential number.
Next, decide when you want the number to be generated. The choice is “On Approval” or “On sent to supplier”
On Approval
The purchase will need to go into an approval process for this to work. Make sure you have your workflows and default workflow set correctly and that the buyers cannot override this.
On sent to Supplier
For this to work you would ideally have a “send to supplier” workflow step or an approval process that sends an email to the originator telling them to send off the order. If the originator is sending the order manually, from within the order, they will need to click the send icon – the number will only be generated as part of this step or the workflow step.
Once set up, you will need to adjust your purchase order template to use the second ref field. Head to Business Settings > HTML Templates and find the Document Template. Replace the placeholder {purchase_order_number} below as shown:
When recording invoices, the order number fields will now be shown as the two numbers together ie 1099 | 9001
In this example 1099 is the order number (the original number) and 9001 is the second ref number. You can add the second ref field into your invoice lists and purchase lists so you can clearly see both sets of numbers.
