Issue a purchase order (Bestellung)

A purchase order (German: Bestellung) is one of the supporting documents you can create in Invoicing alongside invoices. In the create window it's described as "Requests a product or service." A purchase order goes from your company to a supplier, so the recipient here is your supplier, not your end-customer. You use it to formally order materials or services for a job. It carries line items and a total, stays out of any payment tracking, and never appears in a customer's outstanding balance.

Before you start

• Set up your Issuing details first, a one-time admin setup under Settings > Company settings > Invoicing > Issuing details. The same one-time setup that document creation depends on for invoices also applies to purchase orders.
• You can create a purchase order from any workspace. It is a supporting document, so it is available to you the same way anywhere.
• Decide whether the purchase order belongs to an existing document group (a customer and project) or stands alone. Attaching it to a project keeps all the job's paperwork in one container.

Issue a purchase order

The flow is Draft, then Issue, then send, the same lifecycle as every other document in Invoicing:

1. Open the Invoicing tab in the Portal navigation.
2. Click New in the top-right. The Create new document dialog opens.
3. Pick a contact or project if the purchase order belongs to a specific customer or job.
4. In the "What do you want to create?" radio group, choose Purchase order.
5. When you create it under a project, the Option to import and Line item grouping dropdowns appear. Use them to auto-fill the line items from the project's offer instead of entering them manually.
6. Click Create. The purchase order opens in the document editor, the same layout as the invoice editor, with line items, quantities, prices, rebates, locale, and footer.
7. Edit the draft. Add or adjust line items and quantities, set the locale, and fill in the free-text fields (description, memo, and Endnotes). Drafts are fully editable.
8. Click Finalize in the editor header to open the Review and finalize dialog.
9. Tick Send email in the dialog if you want to dispatch it on issue.
10. Click Issue purchase order. Reonic generates the official PDF, assigns the next number from your purchase-order prefix, and locks the document.

If you ticked Send email, the send dialog opens automatically. Otherwise use Send via email on the issued document whenever you're ready.

Numbering and prefix

Purchase orders carry their own number sequence, separate from invoices, partial invoices, credit notes, and the other supporting documents. Configure the prefix and the next number per document type in Settings > Company settings > Invoicing > Issuing details (for example PO-2026-0001 or BEST-2026-0001). The number is assigned when you Issue the document. If you Void a purchase order, the next one you issue takes the following number in the sequence.

Things to know

• Your "customer" on a purchase order is your supplier. This is the one document type in Invoicing that goes to a vendor rather than to your end-customer. The fields are the same; the direction is reversed.
• A draft is editable; an issued document is locked. Once you Issue, the number, the PDF, and all line items and text freeze. The free-text fields save on their own as you type, so there is no Save button, and they stay editable only while the document is in Draft.
• To correct an issued purchase order, Void it and issue a fresh one. The voided document gets a "voided" label and goes inactive in the document group.
• Archive works on Draft or Voided purchase orders. To take an issued one out of your default list view, Void it first, then archive the voided document. Archiving a whole document group also archives every non-archived document inside it (the purchase order included), and Restore group reverses that.
• Convert between document types with Duplicate into type. This creates a new draft of another type (for example an invoice) with the line items and rebates pre-filled.
• Custom conditions go in the Endnotes field. Type any conditions into the free-text Endnotes field (German: Endnoten) at the bottom of the editor; they render as plain text below the document body.

Note: The only PDF that goes out is the one Reonic renders. To send supplier terms or a datasheet alongside the purchase order, send it separately.

Need help?

• Step-by-step questions about this flow. Contact your Reonic account manager.
• Feature requests or something missing. Drop a note to your account manager.
• Bug reports. Include a screenshot and the URL where it happened in your support email.

Last updated on August 4, 2026