Columns, sort order and quantities on a purchase order

Once items are on a purchase order, the items table is where you check quantities, costs and margins. This article covers what each line shows, the columns you can switch on, the sort orders, and how pack sizes affect what you order.

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. Product names follow your catalog: rename a product in Shopify and every order shows the new name, while the SKU and barcode an ordered line was placed with stay as they were.

Open the Columns menu above the items to add more.

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. Three more sit in the same menu: Vendor, the product's Shopify vendor (the brand, or whatever your vendor field holds), Product type, the product's Shopify type, and Landed cost, what a unit will really cost - the order's charges split over the line while it is a draft, and the figure the receipt booked once it has landed.

Metafields as columns. Turn a metafield on under Settings > Data & sync > Your Shopify metafields (Stockroom lists every product and variant definition there, and syncs only the ones you switch on), then 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.

To read an order in a different sequence, open Sort items above the items (the button beside the Columns icon that shows the current order) and choose Newest first, Oldest first, SKU, Supplier SKU, Product title or Vendor. Supplier SKU sorts by your supplier's own code instead of yours, which is the sequence most supplier invoices and packing lists arrive in - so a long order can be checked off straight down the page. It sorts character by character, the way a printed invoice does, so BBK104 comes before BBK14. Lines with no supplier code recorded sit at the bottom. Vendor puts the lines in brand order - useful when one distributor order carries many brands and whoever checks it reads it brand by brand. The choice is saved on the purchase order itself, so the PDF, the emailed copy and the CSV export print in the same order the screen shows, at any status, and new orders start with the order you picked last.

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.