How can we improve purchase orders functionality for better stock management?

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1

I wanted to know if there are any plans to further develop the purchase orders functionality. We’re reliant on this feature as it helps us manage showing ETA’s for stock on the front-end of our store, and it’s also simple for our team to see quantities of incoming stock.

However there are some frustrating limitations…

  1. Can’t add custom columns to purchase orders - it would be fantastic to be able to customise columns on purchase orders - particularly if we could utilise variant/product metafields. Our supplier often has different product names than what we use with our customers - we store these as metafields, but being able to automatically have them show on the purchase order would avoid confusion and save us a lot of time.

  2. Setting different currencies for supplier and storing this price on the product - we only sell in Australian dollars, but all our stock is purchased in Euros. While we can change the currency on an individual purchase order, we currently have to manually enter the supplier price in Euros for each item we order by looking it up on a spreadsheet.

    We can’t use the cost price set in Shopify because it’s in Australian dollars - and we set it to our landed cost rather than the base supplier cost.

    At the moment I think the only workaround would be to set our primary currency in Shopify to Euros, and then add an Australian market. But this would screw up a heap of other functionality so it’s not worthwhile.

  3. Landed Cost Averaging & Currency Conversion It’s a huge pain for us to keep track of our average product cost in Shopify. If purchase orders could track payments to our supplier and the payment dates using currency conversion for those dates, take into account shipping costs and then update our average landed cost in AUD - it would be enormously helpful.

Looking forward to your feedback

2

@LeonB This is very close to the workflow I built LandedCostSync for.

Full disclosure: I’m the developer. In your example, you can stage the supplier prices in EUR while keeping AUD as the Shopify/store currency. The app can freeze a dated ECB/Frankfurter exchange rate, or you can enter the actual AUD totals when the amount paid differs from the reference rate.

Shipping and other inbound charges are allocated across the PO lines by their share of goods value. When the stock is received through Shopify’s native PO or transfer flow, the app calculates the new average landed cost in AUD and updates Shopify’s Cost per item automatically.

It doesn’t track supplier payments or automatically infer the payment date—you choose the FX date or enter the final home-currency totals—but it should remove most of the spreadsheet calculation and manual cost updating you described.

It’s available in the Shopify App Store as LandedCostSync.

3

I agree that purchase orders could be much more flexible. Being able to add custom fields for supplier SKUs, expected arrival dates, and internal notes would save a lot of manual work, especially for stores managing multiple vendors.