Purchase Orders: Ordering & Receiving Stock

Purchase Orders are the paper trail for buying stock. You raise a PO against a supplier, list the materials or consumables you're ordering, and when the parcel arrives you receive it — which increments your inventory counts and logs the movement against the PO number. It's the "restock in" side of your materials and consumables system.

Purchase Orders live under the Purchase Orders item in the sidebar (alongside Suppliers and Consumables) and are available on the Pro plan.

Creating a Purchase Order

On the Purchase Orders page, click New Purchase Order. Fill in:

• Supplier — pick from your existing suppliers, or use the Create new supplier link to add one inline (name required, email and phone optional)
• Expected delivery — an optional date so you know when to chase it
• Line items — click Add Item for each row. Choose a Type (Material, Consumable, or Other), then pick the linked material or consumable. Selecting one auto-fills the description. Set the Qty and Unit cost
• Notes — anything you want to remember about the order

A running total updates as you add rows. Click Create PO to save. Printforge assigns a sequential number in the format PO-YYYY-NNN (e.g. PO-2026-001) and the order starts in Draft status.

Scan an Invoice with AI

At the top of the New Purchase Order window is a Scan Invoice with AI panel. Upload a supplier invoice (PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, or PDF, up to 20MB) and Printforge extracts the supplier, line items, quantities, and costs for you, pre-filling the form. If the AI spots a product that isn't in your library yet, it flags it — note that scanning does not create the material or consumable record for you, so add any new products in Inventory afterwards so future receiving can link to them.

Order Statuses

A purchase order moves through four statuses, which you set from the dropdown on the PO detail page:

• Draft — created but not yet placed
• Ordered — you've placed it with the supplier
• Received — everything has arrived
• Cancelled — the order won't proceed

Purchase Orders are an internal record — there's no email or PDF sent to the supplier. Marking a PO as Ordered is a label for your own tracking, so place the order with your supplier the way you normally would.

Receiving Stock

This is the step that actually updates your inventory. Open the PO and click Receive Items. A Receive Qty box appears on each line, pre-filled with what you've already received. Enter how many arrived (you can receive part of an order and come back for the rest later), then click Confirm Received.

When you confirm, for every line linked to a material or consumable Printforge:

• Increases that item's stock count by the quantity you just received
• Writes a stock transaction tagged with the PO number, so you have an auditable history of the restock

Lines with the Other type only record the received quantity on the PO — they don't touch inventory, because they aren't linked to a tracked item.

How Receiving Ties to Inventory

A few things worth knowing so your stock counts stay accurate:

• Stock is added at receive time — not when you create the PO, and not when you manually flip the status. Only Receive Items → Confirm Received adds stock
• Receiving works on the difference, so re-confirming the same numbers won't double-count
• Once every line is fully received, the PO automatically moves to Received. Receiving part of a Draft order bumps it to Ordered
• Deleting a PO does not reverse stock you've already received — adjust the material or consumable directly if you need to correct it

Attaching the Invoice

On the PO detail page you can upload the supplier's invoice or receipt (PDF or image, up to 5MB) to keep it with the order. Images show inline; other files get a download link.

Tips

• Link line items to real materials and consumables wherever you can — that's what makes receiving update your stock automatically
• Add any AI-flagged new products to your Materials or Consumables library before receiving, so the incoming stock has something to count against
• Use the Expected delivery date and the status filter on the list page to see what's still outstanding at a glance