Purchasing is the module for buying from vendors. It records purchase orders sent to a vendor, quotations and requisitions raised internally, and the vendor master data behind them. Purchasing does not receive stock itself — goods are received through the Warehouse module once they arrive.
What you can do
- Raise a purchase order against a vendor, with product line items, print it, and generate barcodes for its lines. See Purchase Orders.
- Record and update a quotation received from a vendor. See Quotations.
- Raise an internal requisition for products, without pricing. See Requisitions.
- Maintain your vendor records — contact details, credit terms and tax numbers. See Vendors.
Access and permissions
You need a signed-in OCTO Ops account with a verified email address, an active membership in the selected organization, and the Purchasing module enabled for that organization.
Purchasing is governed by permission groups with four submodules — Purchase Orders, Quotations, Requisitions and Vendors. Each offers View (all or own), Create and Edit (all or own); "own" means records you created. There is no Delete permission, because Purchasing has no delete control. Owners and Admins have every permission, and in an organization that has no active permission groups every member keeps full access. The vendor and product lists you pick from on Purchasing forms show every vendor and product.
- Purchase Orders › View opens the list, an order's profile, its print layout and the Purchasing report; Create raises a purchase order (a consumable one raised from Consumables needs the Consumables permission instead); Edit opens Generate barcodes, which also needs Warehouse › Receipts (GRN) › Create to generate them.
- Quotations, Requisitions and Vendors: View opens the list and profiles, Create adds one, Edit opens the edit form.
Business units
When your organization has business units, requisitions, quotations and purchase orders each have a Business unit. A new one starts with the unit chosen in the header (a purchase order then follows its Receiving store's owning unit, until you choose a unit yourself), and the lists filter and show the unit. A document of a unit that is, or sits under, a separate legal entity is numbered in that entity's own sequence and shows its prefix, for example PH-7; every other document continues your organization's numbers. Vendors have no business unit: they are shared by the whole organization. Consumable purchase orders raised from Consumables belong to your main business.
Recommended setup sequence
- Add your Vendors first — purchase orders and quotations pick a vendor from this list.
- Make sure the products you buy exist in Products before raising a purchase order, quotation or requisition, since each line item picks a product from that list.
- Raise Purchase Orders, Quotations or Requisitions as the need arises.
Current limitations
- There is no way to receive stock against a purchase order from inside Purchasing. Receiving goods happens through the Warehouse module's Receipts screen instead.
- Purchase orders cannot be edited once created, and none of the four submodules has a Delete control.
- Quotations and Requisitions have no status options set up, so their Status column is normally blank. Purchase Orders do have statuses (Pending, Placed, Receiving, Received, Canceled), but nothing in the application lets you change a purchase order's status after it is created.
- Printing only works for purchase orders. Quotations and Requisitions have no working print option in this version.
- There is no approval workflow, request-for-quote process, or vendor portal in this version.