About Purchase Orders
The system allows purchase orders (POs) to be created based upon your production amounts or shopping lists, or created from scratch. With the purchase order tools, you have a variety of options that provides benefits and saves time, as described below:
- Create a quantified grocery list based upon your production amounts of a selected date range without the need to manage vendor products. The system calculates in real-time the food items and quantities you need to purchase so that new diet orders, census changes, special event menus, menu changes etc., are always accurately reflected and can take advantage of the forecasting calculations to generate results for the advanced orders to be placed in the future.
- Create full purchase orders that not only calculate the food items you need, but also provide you with details on the specific vendor products and order quantity, pack sizes and much more.
- Save time by submitting your POs electronically to your vendor (limited to specific vendors; contact your support team to learn more.)
- Additional value-added tools include PO worksheets, shopping lists and managing your vendor products.
Benefits
Order Quantity Based Off Production Amounts
One of the methods to populate a PO is from the production amounts of a selected date range and selected meal periods/snack times. Because production amounts use your current diet order census and pull in the vendor products for food items from your scheduled menus, the order quantity is automatically populated on the PO.
Generate an Inventory Worksheet
A common practice is to check inventory amounts while reviewing your PO so that you can make adjustments. For example, spices may need to be removed because you have bulk spices in stock.
To help with this review process, you can print a PO worksheet, which consists of the existing items in the PO, the quantity required, and the auto-calculated order amounts. You can then use this worksheet to mark existing inventory and then return to the cart or open PO to remove items, adjust the order quantities, or change the vendor products.
Below is an example of a PO worksheet.
Create a Shopping List
A PO can be saved as a shopping list, which then can be used to create future PO's.