Purchase order management in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central lets you automate the steps from planning to sending purchase orders to your vendors. Instead of manually carrying out planning lines and creating orders one by one, you can select the lines and let the system create the purchase orders and the vendor emails in one action.
When you use the “Handle journal and send mail” action in the requisition worksheet or planning worksheet, Business Central creates the purchase orders and generates emails ready to send to each vendor. The emails link directly back to the created purchase orders.
The created orders land in the purchase management journal, where you handle them or let your vendors respond through a vendor portal if you have set that up.
Reducing manual work in purchase order management
One of the big advantages of working with purchase order management is that you can minimize the flow and the work you do. A good place to see this is the requisition worksheet, though the same applies to the planning worksheet.
You start by calculating the plan in the requisition worksheet. Up to this point, everything is standard Business Central functionality. The difference comes when you want to use the purchase order handling to automate the next steps.
Creating purchase orders and vendor emails in one action
Normally you would use the Carry Out action to turn your planning lines into purchase orders. With purchase order management, you select the lines you want and choose “Handle journal and send mail” instead.
In this example, selecting two lines creates two purchase orders and two emails ready to send to the vendors. You can also create quotes instead of orders if that fits your process.
The emails link directly back to the created purchase orders, so you can move straight from the email to the order. From there you can send the email to the vendor.
Handling orders in the purchase management journal
After running the action, the two orders sit in your purchase management journal. You handle them from there. Alternatively, they can appear on the vendor portal if you have set up that option, so your vendors can respond directly.
This is one example of an automated flow. The purchase management journal also handles the back-and-forth communication with the vendor.
Q&A
What does the “Handle journal and send mail” action do in Business Central?
It creates purchase orders from your selected planning lines and generates the corresponding vendor emails in one action. The emails link back to the created purchase orders, and the orders land in the purchase management journal.
Can I use purchase order management from both the requisition worksheet and the planning worksheet?
Yes. You can calculate the plan in either worksheet and then use the automated handling to create orders and emails from the selected lines.
Can I create quotes instead of purchase orders?
Yes. When you run the automated action you can choose to create quotes instead of orders, depending on what your process needs.
How do vendors receive and respond to the orders?
You can send the generated emails directly to the vendor. If you set it up, the orders can also appear on a vendor portal where vendors respond directly.