Mobile Purchase Orders
Overview
Mobile Purchase Orders allow an employee out in the field or at a Supplier, to quickly put together a Purchase Order on-the-go, approve it and have it fulfilled. The intention on this simple Purchase Order creation screen is to enable an employee to carry on with their job, while complying with the procurement process your company has.
Approval limits still apply and once the Purchase Order is submitted the approval workflow will be triggered. However, ideally, there would be a workflow where the PO Purchaser would be allowed to approve their own PO (the user’s role needs to include 'Approve Own Purchaser Orders' permission as well) up to a reasonable limit, to speed up the process. From the Mobile PO screen a user can submit and approve; Send back and Reject buttons are not available.
Screen Guide
For easy access to the Mobile Purchase Order screens, create a tile on the Home screen, so it can easily be accessed from a mobile phone screen on only one tap.
Purchase Order List screen displays all unapproved Purchase Orders created by the logged in user.
Click on the headers to sort by that column ascending o descending.
The PO Number column is a hyperlink to the actual Purchase Order.
Thew New Purchase Order button at the bottom will open a new screen where a new Purchase Order can be created with one or multiple lines.
Create Purchase Order
The Purchase Order number will be auto generated on save. Or alternatively, if Control Parameter 'Allow Manual PO Numbers' is set to Yes, a manual PO can be entered. This is a system wide configuration and will dictate the PO number creation on both desktop and mobile POs.
Supplier list will be limited to those supplier with a Location matching the User’s Profit Centre Location. There is no Location selection on mobile POs. However, a different default location can be configured using the setting ‘PO Location Default' for users to purchase from another Location.
Address Job is the job for which the PO is being created, although each line can have different jobs.
Address Title is driven by the Job selection, and it will display all the address titles on the client for that Job.
The screen has four sections, the header, Line details, Summary, and Attachments. A line at a time can be added. When clicking [Save] button on the Line is added to the Summary section on the bottom of the screen. Attachments are added to the PO header, and will not be sent out when the PO is emailed out.
Each saved line can be edited with the green Edit button or duplicated with the grey copy button. To delete an existing line use the red X button. User will be prompted to confirm the deletion of the line.
Always save any changes done on the PO with the SAVE button at the bottom of the screen. A green bell will display next to the Save button at the bottom of the screen showing that changes have not been saved yet. A green message at the top will appear confirming the PO has been saved and the green bell will disappear.
Clear grey button at the bottom of the page will reload the last saved PO, without saving any unsaved recent changes. This may come in handy when a user made a changes by mistake or don’t want to save any of the latest changes. It behaves lik ethe refresh button on a desktop browser.
Submit and Approve
Once the PO is ready to be submitted, click on the Submit button. A green confirmation message will be shown at the top of the screen. An Approval Workflow schema will now take its course.
If the user has the authority to approve, the Approve button will show. User can approve and send PO to the supplier’s email or her/his own email address.
Note that once the PO is approved, if the user leaves the screen the PO will not be listed on the Mobile PO list anymore as it is now approved and cannot be accessed from this screen.
It is important to send the PO to the supplier or your own email address right after approving it, without leaving the PO screen.
Send PO to Supplier
Once the PO has been approved the blue [Send] button appears where an email can be typed in, or an email or person name can be searched within the contacts in Workbench.
The [Send] button sends the PO right away; there will be no preview of the PDF being sent. All attachments to the PO can be included in the email sent to the supplier by ticking 'Include All Attachments'
A green confirmation message will popup advising it has been successfully sent. Email could take up to 2 minutes to be delivered.
Multiple emails can be entered. Note that the system will suggest contacts that match the name or email address you are typing. It will display the name and company in brackets, and an email address below the name if it exists. If the contact has no email address only the name will be displayed, and it will not be a valid contact to send the PO to.
It is good practice to send a copy of the PO to your own email address, to have handy in case you need to refer to it once you have left the screen.
If the email address does not exist on any existing contacts in Workbench, an email address can be manually typed.
Tip:
When saving changes, submitting or approving, depending on your mobile phone and browser, the confirmation pop-up message might have the option Suppress dialogues. Do not select Suppress dialogues as this will prevent you from confirming your actions. OK or Cancel are the valid options to select.