About Purchase Orders

• About Purchase Orders
  • Other Benefits
• Purchase Order Process
• FAQs
  • I manually maintain my vendor products (i.e., no interface with the vendor). Can I still create a purchase order in the system?
  • Can I submit my POs directly to the vendor via an interface?

About Purchase Orders

The system allows purchase orders (POs) to be created based upon your production amounts or created from scratch. By creating a PO from production amounts of a selected date range, your PO's automatically calculate the food items needed and the associated vendor products of those food items and order quantity. 


 

Other Benefits

• Create a quantified grocery list (without the need to manage vendor products) to automatically calculate in real-time the food items and quantities you need to purchase. 
   
• For specific vendors you can submit your POs electronically (contact your Support team to learn more).
   
• PO worksheets to check inventory, 
   
• Create shopping lists for non-food items and add those lists to a PO.
   
• Ability to review and manually adjust the purchase orders. 

Purchase Order Process

The below steps provide an overview to create purchase orders. Please note, the ability to electronically submit purchase orders is dependent on your particular vendor. If you are unsure if you can submit purchase orders directly to your vendor contact the MealSuite Support team. 

The process to create and submit a purchase order in the system is as follows:

1. Create a new shopping cart record in the system. 
2. Populate the shopping cart with vendor products. This can be done as follows:
   • Pull in items from production.
   • Pull in non-food items from a shopping list.
   • Manually adding vendor products.
3. Review the cart, which can involve:
   • Printing a PO worksheet to check inventory. 
   • Removing items.
   • Adding specific vendor products. 
   • Adjusting order quantities.
   • Changing vendor products.
   • Adding a product to a food item that has the "No Vendor Product" label
4. Create the purchase order(s) from the cart. 
5. Submit the PO to the vendor. The submittal process is different depending if the vendor has a PO interface or not with the MealSuite system. 
   • For a vendor that has a PO interface, the PO will be submitted directly to the vendor.
   • For a vendor that does not have a PO interface, the PO will not be submitted directly to the vendor. Instead you are required to save and close the PO, and then print it as a PDF to submit via the vendor process (email, upload to portal, etc.).

FAQs

I manually maintain my vendor products (i.e., no interface with the vendor). Can I still create a purchase order in the system?

Yes. If you manually maintain your own vendor products, you can create purchase orders in the system; however, these purchase orders cannot be submitted directly to the vendor via a PO interface and instead will be submitted manually via existing processes (email, upload to portal, etc.).

Can I submit my POs directly to the vendor via an interface?

If the vendor is a MealSuite partner vendor (i.e., one with an interface enabled that allows for the automatic import of your order guide/vendor product list), then yes an associated PO interface may exist for that partner vendor that allows you to submit the POs directly. Contact MealSuite Support to learn more.