Purchase Order Issues

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contemporary Furniture and lighting, most of which is pre-ordered by clients and so i need to have a good PO system. We moved from Lightspeed Onsite that was excellent for POs etc and order tracking, but API was not great.
We chose Stocky as the best of a bad bunch of apps for order tracking. Now we need to find an alternative and i think the inbuilt is the way to go as do not want to move to another app that is then axed too.
In order for the inbuilt PO to work well for us, we could do with a few simple amendments.

What feedback do you want?

  1. an extra column to allow us to add details to be able to cross reference an order with a client’s invoice number / name
  2. an option to add a custom product to a PO - ie sometimes there may be an additional cost/ custom item to add to send to the supplier that does not need a shopify product making for
  3. when we write notes in the “Notes to Supplier” section any pagination is lost - so suppliers cannot read it
  4. have a % discount adjustment
  5. have easier access to Supplier section to add more supplier notes etc

Screenshot

po test.jpg
po test.jpg2336×1670 246 KB
PO columns _ squashed text.jpg
PO columns _ squashed text.jpg1658×2002 326 KB

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Hey @Donald1113 ,

These all seem like practical improvements especially for businesses that rely heavily on pre orders and supplier purchase orders, like premium furniture and lighting retailers.

The additional reference field would make it much easier to link a purchase order back to a specific customer invoice or project without relying on the notes section. I also agree that being able to add non catalog custom line items would be useful for handling supplier specific charges or bespoke items without creating temporary Shopify products.

The formatting issue in “Notes to Supplier” also stands out from your screenshots. Preserving line breaks in the generated PO would make the document much more readable for suppliers, particularly when multiple customer references are included. A percentage discount option and improved supplier management would also make the built in PO system a stronger long term alternative as merchants transition away from Stocky.

Hopefully Shopify continues investing in the native purchase order workflow, as these enhancements would benefit many merchants managing complex purchasing processes.

Thank You !

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Hi @Donald1113

Pre-orders and supplier purchases would go much more smoothly without the need for additional apps like Stocky with a specific customer reference field and bespoke line items.

The native PO workflow would undoubtedly become much more dependable if the formatting in “Notes to Supplier” was corrected and percentage discounts were added. I hope Shopify investigates these upgrades shortly!

Thanks!

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I run operations for a distribution depot, so I’m going through the same migration and POs are my daily reality. Two urgent things first, then your five points.

Suppliers can’t be exported from Stocky. Not “won’t import” - they can’t be exported at all. For a multi-brand business like yours that means rebuilding your supplier list manually in Shopify. Worth starting now rather than in the last week.

Shopify advise stopping new POs in Stocky about 14 days before 31 August, receiving and closing everything open before the cutoff, then recreating only remaining quantities in Shopify. That puts your last-new-PO date around the 17th. Historical POs and stocktakes also can’t be imported, so export the completed PO reports and cost history you need for your records first.

Before you commit to inbuilt, one thing to weigh given why you left Lightspeed: there is currently no purchase order API. The Transfers API is live, but Shopify’s docs list PO APIs as “under consideration”. If API access is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, that’s worth knowing now.

On your five:

1. Cross-reference column for client invoice number - use metafields. Shopify’s migration guide says explicitly that if you used Stocky’s custom fields on POs and transfers, metafields carry that workflow over. Create a definition like po.client_reference and it becomes a field you can fill and report on. Transfers also have a native Reference number field.

2. Custom line item with no Shopify product - not directly supported. POs take product line items. Two partial routes: PO adjustments handle extra shipping, fees and duties as separate amounts; and for genuine one-offs, an unpublished “Sundries / Custom item” product used as a placeholder line with the cost typed in works, if inelegant.

3. Notes to Supplier losing line breaks - no fix I can find. Since you can’t email a PO from the admin anyway and have to download the PDF, the practical workaround is keeping that field short and putting the detail in your covering email.

4. Percentage discount - adjustments are absolute amounts, not percentages. You’d calculate it and enter a negative adjustment. Worth adding to your feature request.

5. Supplier notes and access - one thing that will catch you out: supplier currency and payment terms save on each individual PO, not as defaults on the supplier profile. So they need re-entering each time. For supplier lead times, SKUs, minimum order quantities and case packs, variant metafields are the intended home (supplier.lead_time_days, supplier.case_quantity and so on).

Given most of your stock is pre-ordered by clients, there’s a documented pattern worth a look: keep your PO and financial record as your own source of truth, then create incoming transfers with a blank origin via the Transfers API, putting your PO reference in the transfer’s Reference number field. You receive against the transfer, stock lands correctly, and your client-order cross-referencing stays somewhere you fully control. It’s the closest thing to the Lightspeed workflow you lost.

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thank you - i appreciate your comments. we have moved most suppliers over and so are getting used to using the transfers feature. we have been using tags and so will try the metafield that you suggested.

have a great day