Purchasing in Steelhead

Purchasing Inventory

There are a few different spots where you can create a purchase order.

1. Go to the purchase orders page in Steelhead and click "new purchase order."
2. Go to an inventory item's page in Steelhead and click "new purchase order."
3. Go to the low inventory control page and either select the items and click "new purchase order," or scroll down the item list and click "new PO" on the right side.

The low inventory control page makes it very easy to manage your inventory. You can easily create PO's for your low quantities and you can view items that are on order.

Creating a Purchase Order

No matter which of the three above options you use, you will get the same "New Purchase Order" dialog. If you are creating a PO using option 2 or 3, some information will be pre-populated including the vendor, the item name, the item units, and the unit price if this information is already in Steelhead.

On the new purchase order dialog, you can select the vendor, vendor address, "Ship Via," a deadline for the PO, and the draft variant if you have purchase order stages set up. If you know the unit price for the item, enter that in along with the quantity. You can add multiple purchase order items.

Currently, if your customer wants to add notes to the PO PDF, you should create a PO custom input schema on the purchase orders page and call it something like "PO Notes" or "Special Instructions."

Purchase Order Stages

It is common for companies to have an approval step for purchase orders. Someone in production will create a PO draft when they realize inventory is low, and they will have a production manager review and issue the PO. In Steelhead, you can add purchase order stages and you can set permissions on which users can issue purchase orders.

To set up purchase order stages, click on the stages button in the top right corner of the PO page.

Click "configure purchase order stages."

Leave the first and last stages in place, and add stages in between (you can change the names of draft and active if you'd like.)

Click "add stage" to add a "main" stage type. Click the + next to a stage to add a sub-stage/step.

Now with these stages set, the purchase order creator will create the draft and move it to the review stage. Someone on the production management team will do the initial review and then push it to the supervisor for final review.