This article explains how you create vendor-specific purchase orders from a shopping cart.
Note: Any food item with a missing vendor product will be ignored and not included in the PO. To address missing vendor products in your cart before creating the PO(s), see What if an Item in a Cart has No Vendor Product?
To create POs from a shopping cart:
- Select Procurement > Purchase Orders and click on the desired cart to open it.
- Click the Create Purchase Orders button at top right corner of screen.
- If the vendor has a PO interface enabled with the MealSuite system and the interface detects a product has insufficient quantity for the requested order amount, then a message appears indicating such. Click OK to proceed.
- If an item is not linked to a vendor product in the system, or if the vendor has a PO interface enabled with the MealSuite system and the interface detects if products are out of stock on the vendor side, then a message appears indicating that products are unavailable, and gives you the option to review the unavailable products or accept the system removing them from your PO. The message that appears is dependent on the number of unavailable products: :
- Only one product not available - "There is 1 item not available. The product will be removed from your order." The one product will be listed in the message pop-up.
- If up to five products are not available - "There are [x] items not available. The products will be removed from your order." The products will be listed in the message pop-up.
- If more than five products are not available - "There are [x] items not available. The products will be removed from your order." The products are not listed.
If you click the Review Unavailable Products button, the pop-up closes and you are returned to the shopping cart screen, which refreshes with the list of the unavailable products (which is accomplished by the All Unavailable Products filter being automatically selected).
- Only one product not available - "There is 1 item not available. The product will be removed from your order." The one product will be listed in the message pop-up.
- If the vendor is a non-interface vendor, or for an interface-enabled vendor you click Accept to the unavailable products message, or for an interface-enabled vendor in which there are no unavailable products from the vendor, then the system creates a separate PO for each vendor in the cart, listed as tiles under the Create Purchase Orders tab (screenshot below). Each PO tile identifies the following:
- Expected delivery date - based on your delivery information configured for the vendor.
- Total Items
- Total Price - if the vendor is configured with a minimum order amount, then this amount is listed, and if the PO does not reach the minimum order amount, progress bar is displayed in red.
-
Number of out of stock items
- A vendor may manage its special order products by creating a separate "special order PO". If so, then that "special order PO" is created beside the regular PO (screenshot below). A special order PO can be printed as a downloadable PDF to be used to manually submit (i.e., phone, email) its products to the vendor. For more information on working with special order POs, see Special Order Products and Purchase Orders.
- By clicking the Review Order button, you can continue to review the PO.
- When returning to the Purchase Order listing screen (Procurement > Purchase Orders), each PO is assigned a PO number with the status of Open. As long as the PO remains open (i.e., not submitted), you can continue to review it by clicking to open it.
- To submit the PO to the vendor, see Submitting a Purchase Order.