Creating and Sending Purchase Orders

A purchase order in Stockroom takes about a minute to build: pick a supplier, add products from your catalog, and send it off as a PDF. This guide covers the full toolkit, including ordering for more than one location, adding items after ordering, payment tracking, and cost updates when you order.

Visit Purchase orders and click Create purchase order. At the top of the new PO, set:

The number this order will get shows under the title as soon as the page opens - handy if you need to quote it to your supplier while you're still building the order. It's assigned for real when the order is created.

Just below the header, pick a Destination for your products - the Shopify location this stock will arrive at. A destination is required before the PO can be marked as ordered. (Single-location stores don't see a picker - your one location is used automatically.)

Shipping somewhere that is not a Shopify location - a customer's address, a trade show? Click Edit ship-to beside the destination to type a one-off delivery address; it prints on the PDF in place of the location's address, received stock still lands at the chosen location, and Use location address switches back anytime. Shipping straight to your customer? Tick This ships straight to a customer under the address and the order prints that address and can fulfill the customer's Shopify order. Whether it also moves your stock is a separate choice - Stock handling in the Details card, which most stores leave alone. See Dropship purchase orders: ship straight to your customer.

Quick-add/scan by SKU or barcode. Type or use a barcode scanner into the Add products field and press Enter (or click Add). An exact SKU or barcode match is added instantly - perfect if you're working from a supplier catalog or scanning items. A scan always adds one unit - the line starts at a quantity of 1, and scanning the same code again bumps it to 2, then 3, so you can work straight down a stack. Need a bigger number? Scan it once and type the quantity over it. If there's no exact match, Stockroom adds the closest product search result.

Search by product name. Don't know the code? Type two or more letters of a product's name into that same Add products field and matching products appear just underneath, each with its SKU and the stock you currently hold at this destination. Click one - or use the arrow keys and press Enter - and it lands on the order. This is usually the quickest way when you're building an order at a desk rather than scanning a shelf.

Browse your catalog. Click Browse products to open Stockroom's product picker and add several at once - tick a row, or type a quantity straight into it. To review a supplier's whole range at once, tick Select all above the list and every product the current filters match lands on the order at a quantity of 1, ready to look through - untick the rows you don't want and adjust the rest. It selects up to 1,000 items, and tells you if the filters matched more. Clicking a row only ever adds it, so a stray click can't undo your work - to take a row off, untick its checkbox in the Select column. A quantity you typed is remembered if you untick and tick the row again. Each row shows the supplier's own code for the item and the stock you hold at this order's destination, and lines arrive with SKU and current unit cost pre-filled. Picking a product the order already has adds it again, as a second line - see The same product on more than one line below.

The filter row narrows what you are looking at: vendor (on a purchase order this opens already set to your supplier, and widening it is one click, because a distributor's order can carry other brands), product type, tag, ABC grade, and Status.

Every row carries the numbers behind the decision. Under the Available count you see what is already on the way and what the product has sold in your sales window (set under Settings → Reorder suggestions), and under the product name its own tags - the first three, with a +N more beside them that shows the rest when you hover it, or opens them in place when you tap it on a phone or tablet.

Long lists load in pages. The picker shows 250 products at a time. If the supplier has more, a Load more button sits under the list and brings in the next 250, with a count beside it of how many are loaded so far - keep clicking to reach the end of a large catalog. Nothing is left out: quantities you have already typed stay put as more rows arrive, so you can work through a long list in passes. You can also narrow it with the filters or the search box first, which is usually quicker than paging when you know what you are after.

The item is not in Shopify yet? Create it without leaving the order: New product sits in the picker's footer, and when a search finds nothing the picker offers to create exactly what you typed. The dialog creates a real Shopify product - title, SKU, barcode, vendor, product type and cost - and adds it to the order in one step. Tick This product has variants to add up to three options (like Size or Color) with per-variant SKUs, barcodes, costs and quantities; each variant lands as its own line. Products are created as drafts, so they can be ordered, received and counted right away but stay off your sales channels until you tick Ready to sell (with a price) or finish the listing in Shopify.

Draft products can go on a purchase order. The picker opens on Active and draft, so a line you have not launched yet is there to order - which is the normal case when you are buying a season ahead and holding the products in draft until they can go on sale. Draft rows are marked Draft so you can tell them apart. Archived products are the one thing left out by default, since that is the "we stopped selling it" state - set Status to Archived or All statuses and they come back, marked the same way. Whatever you set Status to, the picker remembers it and opens there next time - so if your seasonal lines sit in draft all year and you would rather see only what is active, set it once. Ordering, receiving and stock updates all work the same whatever the product's status; Stockroom never changes it.

Custom lines. Click Add custom line for anything not in your Shopify catalog - samples, packaging, a one-off item. Just type the item name, quantity, and cost. Custom lines don't touch your Shopify inventory, since there's no product to update.

Add everything that needs reordering. Click Suggest, then Add suggested products, and Stockroom pulls in every product from this supplier at or below its reorder point, with quantities already suggested from your sales history - the same list the Reorder page shows for that supplier, minus anything an open draft already covers. Running it again only adds items not yet on the order - it never changes a quantity you have set. It is the fastest way to build "a PO for this brand with what we actually need."

Add suggested products added nothing? That almost always means the items are already on another open draft - an item sitting on any open draft PO is not suggested again, so you cannot order the same stock twice. If you clicked Create draft POs on the Reorder page, that already created a draft for each supplier with everything on it - check the Draft tab on the Purchase orders page before starting a new PO. A draft imported from Stocky counts too: while it stays open, its items stay covered. Delete any draft you do not plan to send and those items are suggested again. Suggestions are also per destination, so a PO shipping to a different location than the one running low has nothing to add.

Each line shows Product (with its SKU right underneath), the current Available stock at the line’s destination - plus what the rest of your locations hold, and a "+N incoming" note when more is already on order - Qty, Unit cost, Discount %, Retail / margin (your current retail price with the margin at this cost, so pricing errors jump out), and its Total, with a trash icon to remove it (or set Qty to 0 - the line shows "Removed on save"). If your buyers do not price while they are composing an order, you can switch Unit cost, Discount %, Retail / margin and Total off in the Columns menu above the items, which frees up the width for the part number and note columns. They are ticked to start with, they only affect the order you are building, and the trash icon stays whatever you hide. Qty is always there. Every product you add starts at a quantity of 1, however you added it - scanned, searched, or browsed - because Stockroom never guesses a number on your behalf. When you do want it to, that is what Suggest is for: it proposes quantities from your sales history, and you can edit every one afterwards. Suggest stays disabled until a supplier and destination are set, and tells you why. Suggestions also need sales history, so on a brand-new install give Stockroom's sales analysis a little while to finish before the numbers mean much.

The same Columns menu holds Sort lines. Lines normally keep the order you added them in; choose Vendor A-Z, Title A-Z or SKU A-Z and the draft re-arranges itself - useful when one distributor order carries many brands and whoever checks it reads it brand by brand. New lines drop into place as you add them, the arrangement is what prints and emails, and your choice is remembered for every draft until you set it back to As added.

Ordering for a longer stretch? Open Suggest and you'll find a cover dropdown set to Default cover - your Order cover (days) from Settings > Reorder suggestions. Switch it to 14-day, 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, 180-day, or 365-day cover and every suggested quantity recalculates to carry you through that timeframe at each item's sales pace - handy before a busy season or a long supplier gap. It applies to Fill suggested quantities and Add suggested products alike.

The newest line sits at the top. As you add items, the one you just added appears at the top of the list, so a long order never sends you scrolling to check it landed. Use the Newest first / Oldest first control just above the list to switch back to the order you added things in, and Stockroom remembers your choice on that device. Either way, your supplier's PDF always lists the items in the order you built them.

Products with a pack size or minimum order quantity set (see Set reorder points and stock levels) show the breakdown under Qty - "3 cases of 4" - with a caution when the quantity is not a whole number of packs or sits under the minimum. Stockroom never rounds your quantity for you, and the supplier PDF prints the pack breakdown on exact multiples.

Telling near-identical products apart. The picker shows each item's barcode (UPC/EAN) beside its SKU, and you can search on either - so two items that share a name are still easy to tell apart. If you keep extra details in Shopify metafields - a season, a model year, a fabric - Stockroom shows those too. It picks up your product and variant metafields automatically; you can see which ones under Settings > Data & sync > Your Shopify metafields, and turn off any you do not want.

Metafields as columns. Once a metafield is being synced you can add it as a column on the order itself: open the Columns menu above the items list and tick it. The column shows the current value from Shopify, so a value you correct later reads correctly on orders you placed before. You can also map a metafield into a supplier's CSV export format, and print up to two of them as columns on the PO PDF (Settings > Documents & email). Metafields are read-only in Stockroom - Shopify stays the place you edit them.

One purchase order can send stock to several locations. Click Add another destination to add a second product section with its own location, and add that location's items there.

You can see what your other locations already hold. When your store has more than one location, a line reads something like 0 here · 24 all locations under the SKU - what this destination has, and what your whole store has. Hover over it, or tap it on a phone, to see where those 24 units are sitting, location by location. It answers a question one number cannot: if the stock you need is already at another location, moving it may be a better call than buying more.

See Create purchase orders faster for more, including creating POs straight from a Shopify order, the Inventory page, or POS.

Some instructions belong to one item, not the whole order. Click the note icon at the end of any line and you get two notes plus that supplier's part number:

The icon fills in on lines that have something on them, so you can see at a glance which items carry instructions. Both notes stay editable after you have sent the order - a note is not a change to what you ordered - and the internal note is often most useful then, while you are waiting for the delivery.

If you annotate most lines, you can show these as columns instead of opening each line. Use the Columns button above the items and switch on Supplier SKU, Supplier note or Internal note. On a draft you type straight into the columns; on an order you have already sent they read as text, shortened to two lines with the full note a tap away. The choice is remembered for your whole store and applies to orders you are building and orders you have already placed. If the extra columns make the table wider than the page, it scrolls sideways - switch off a column you do not need, and it fits again.

The same menu carries three columns for deciding quantities: Sold, the units sold in your sales window, Tags, the product's own tags, and All locations, the stock your whole store holds. Sold reads the same nightly figure the Reorder page states its suggestions from, so the two can never disagree, and a dash means that product has no sales history yet while a zero means it sold nothing - which is the number that stops a reorder. The window is Sales window (days) under Settings > Reorder suggestions: set it to 90 and the column answers "how many did we sell in the last 90 days". There is also a Barcode column, showing each product's barcode from Shopify beside its name - handy when your shelf labels and supplier catalogs speak in barcodes. None of these columns ever print on the supplier's copy.

A purchase order can carry the same product as many times as you need it, each line with its own notes. Pick the product from Browse products or the Add products search a second time and you get a second line, not a bigger quantity on the first one. Stockroom tells you it is already on the order as the line lands, and marks it in the search results, so a repeat is always something you meant.

This is for items where two lots of the same thing are two different jobs. An optician ordering the same lens for two customers puts the prescription in the supplier note and the customer's order number in the internal note, once per line, and the supplier gets one purchase order that spells out both.

Scanning still counts up. A barcode scan means "one more of these", so scanning the same code twice makes it a quantity of 2 on one line - that is what you want when you are working down a stack of cartons. Use the picker or the search field when you want a second line.

Importing a CSV follows the same idea: two rows for one item become two lines when their notes differ, and merge into one line when they say the same thing.

Supplier notes print whenever notes are switched on for the document. To turn them off for one supplier, or for everyone, see Customize the purchase order PDF.

One collapsible Details card holds the rest:

Date fields take dates the way you type them: 08/28/2026, 8/28, 0828, and 20260828 all work, and a date without a year assumes the current year. Press T for today, and the up and down arrow keys move the date a day at a time.

Click Save. Only a supplier is required, so you can save a skeleton PO early and build it up as you go. Your new PO is created as a Draft, numbered automatically (PO-1001, PO-1002, and so on), and stays fully editable until you mark it as ordered.

Want different numbering? Settings > Purchase order numbering holds a Format, a starting number, and zero-padding. Put {number} where the counter goes, and add {YYYY}, {YY}, {MM} or {DD} to build the date into it:

The page shows the exact next number as you type, and dates follow your store's timezone. Start counting from is the first number issued: set it to 1250 and your next purchase order is PO-1250. A number that has already been used is never reissued - the sequence continues from whichever is higher. One thing to know before you date a number: the counter starts over each period, so July might end at 1005 and August start again at 1001.

On the PO, click Email to supplier:

Once a purchase order has been emailed, the button reads Email again to supplier and an Emailed pill with the send date appears next to the status at the top of the PO - so you can tell at a glance it went out. Sending again any time is fine: the supplier simply gets a fresh copy of the current order.

Every send is recorded in the History card at the bottom of the PO - who sent it, when, and to which addresses - and each email row has a View PDF button that opens the exact document that went out, so you always know whether a supplier has the latest version (the email dialog also shows Last sent). The same row shows an Opened badge with the time the supplier first opened the email. Every PO email also carries an Open this order button, which takes the supplier to their own page for that order - no login, and they can come back to it any time. From there they can confirm they've received it, give you an expected ship date, mark it as shipped with a tracking number, and leave you a note. Everything they report lands on the purchase order straight away: a green Supplier confirmed badge and a Supplier ships date at the top, rows in the History, and a ship notice that moves the PO to On the way and shows the tracking in Shipments, exactly as if you had marked it yourself. The Purchase orders list shows it too: a green check appears beside an order's status once the supplier confirms (hover it for the date), and the Filter menu can narrow the list to Confirmed by supplier or Awaiting supplier confirmation. The list can also show one day's deliveries: pick a date in the Received on filter and only orders with a delivery received that day remain - handy for "what arrived yesterday" - and the CSV exports follow whatever the list is showing. For a ranged summary of deliveries, the Receipts report's One row per delivery view is the tool. They are asked for the tracking number only - Stockroom recognises most carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, Canada Post, Royal Mail, Australia Post and the national postal services) from the number itself, fills the carrier in for you, and turns the number into a link to that carrier's own tracking page. The same happens on any shipment you record yourself: leave Carrier blank and it fills itself in, or type it and yours is kept. A courier Stockroom doesn't recognise is left exactly as you typed it, with no link - Stockroom never guesses, because a wrong carrier would send you to a page saying your parcel doesn't exist. For those couriers, paste the parcel's tracking page into the Tracking link field beside the number (in the Mark as on the way / Add tracking dialog) and the number becomes a link to it - the carrier's name is read off the link. Your supplier gets the same field on their order page once a number they saved isn't recognised. If only part of the order is on the truck, the Mark as on the way dialog can say so: under What's in this shipment?, tick the items in the parcel and set how many of each are coming (up to what the order still expects). The Shipments section then lists what each parcel contains, so your team can see what is in route versus what is still to ship - and when the delivery arrives, receiving can pre-fill those quantities for you. Leave everything unticked when the whole order shipped. While the order is on the way, the purchase order list shows the shipment's expected arrival date and a Track link right in the Expected column, so you can follow a parcel without opening the order. Prefer another channel? Download PDF, or Print it directly, and send it however you like.

Their page also offers See all purchase orders - a free Stockroom account where your supplier sees every order you (and their other buyers) send them in one place. From their account they can also confirm an order, share an expected ship date and tracking, and leave you notes - the same updates as the emailed order page, and they land on your purchase order the same way. They can also invite teammates into that account, so their whole order desk works from the same view. Whether they use it is entirely up to them, and it never shows them more than the orders you already emailed. Once someone at the supplier sets it up, that supplier's page in Stockroom shows who added it ("added by") with a Remove access button, so you can withdraw it at any time - after that, only a new purchase order you email them can set it up again.

Set your own default: in Settings > Supplier email you can customize the subject and message (with variables like {{po_number}} and {{supplier_name}}), choose whether to include the order summary table, and set a reply-to address. You can also pick Letter or A4 paper. See Customize your supplier emails and PO PDFs.

When the order is placed, click Mark as ordered. Incoming quantities are pushed to Shopify (visible on your product pages), and the PO is ready to Receive when stock arrives.

If your line costs differ from your products' current costs, Stockroom offers to update your Shopify costs to match as you mark it ordered - your choice, every time. See Keep your product costs current when you order.

A couple of guardrails: the PO needs a Destination and at least one line item first. And once ordered, existing line items are fixed - quantities and costs stay put so your receiving history stays accurate, while the Reference, Supplier invoice #, Notes, Expected arrival, and Payment due stay editable. Two escape hatches: Add items on any destination section adds new lines to an ordered or partially received PO (their incoming stock pushes to Shopify on save, and Stockroom nudges you to resend the PDF if the supplier already has it); and More actions → Revert to draft pulls the incoming stock back out of Shopify and reopens full editing. If the PO already has receives, the confirmation lets you know they'll be undone first, and handles that in the same step.

Every PO carries a payment status, separate from its ordering lifecycle - mark it paid from More actions on the PO, or in bulk from the list. Past the Payment due date, unpaid POs show an Overdue badge, and the list's filter dropdown covers both money and delivery: Unpaid, Partially paid, Paid, Payment overdue, and Late delivery (open orders past their expected date - the same orders the "N late" badge above the list counts).

When a supplier invoices an order in pieces, record each payment as it happens: the Payments card on the PO takes an amount (pre-filled to the outstanding balance), a date, an optional method, and a reference like a check number. The order shows Partially paid until the payments reach the total, the card keeps a running balance against the order total, and deleting a payment row undoes it. Once payments are recorded, Mark as paid records the remaining balance as a payment - and the order can only go back to unpaid by removing its payments, so recorded history is never silently erased.

This is bookkeeping inside Stockroom only - it is never pushed to QuickBooks, where bill payment lives.

Every saved purchase order has a History card at the bottom, and at the top of it is a comment box. Type in Leave a comment, press Post, and your note joins the timeline alongside everything else that happened to the order - when it was emailed, received, or closed. It works the same way in the Shopify admin and on go.stockroom.app.

Comments are for your team. They never appear on the purchase order PDF, in the email your supplier gets, or on the page your supplier uses to confirm the order.

Type @ and start typing a name - pick it from the list, and that person gets an email saying you mentioned them, with your comment quoted and a link straight to the order. You can also just type the name out; Stockroom matches it either way.

The list shows the people who have opened Stockroom on your store. Shopify only lets apps read a store's full staff list on Plus and Advanced plans, so a colleague who has never opened Stockroom will not be there yet - once they open it once, they can be mentioned from then on.

Editing a comment to add another name emails only the person you just added, so you can fix a typo without emailing everyone again. Anyone who would rather not get these emails can turn them off from the link at the bottom of one - that stops the email only, and comments still show up on the order.

You can Edit or Delete your own comments from the icons on the right of the row. An edited comment says so. Nobody can change or remove someone else's comment.

Supplier invoices, quotes, packing slips, a photo of a damaged carton - anything that belongs with this order can live on it. Drag files onto the Attachments card, or click the card to browse. You get 5 files per order at up to 10 MB each, and Stockroom takes PDFs, images (png, jpg, jpeg, gif, webp, heic), spreadsheets (csv, xls, xlsx) and documents (doc, docx, txt, rtf). View opens a file in a new tab, and the delete button beside it removes the file.

You do not have to save first. Drop files on a brand-new purchase order or return and they upload the moment you save it, so the paperwork and the order go in together.

Your files stay inside Stockroom unless you choose to send them. When you click Email to supplier, the dialog offers a checkbox reading Also attach the 2 uploaded files - with your own count and total size - and it starts unticked every time. Tick it and your files ride along with the PO PDF. One email has room for roughly 7 MB of files beside the PDF: anything over that is skipped rather than failing the send, and the dialog tells you before you click.

The Purchase orders list has a row of controls above the table, and everything you set there stays in the address bar - so a view you use often can be bookmarked.

Export always writes exactly what the list is showing, so sort or filter first and the file follows. See Export a purchase order in your supplier's own CSV format for the columns.

For an overview of everything purchasing covers, see Purchase orders on stockroom.app.