Our purchase order feature is a powerful tool to organize your pipeline of raw materials. This feature lets you manage your purchasing workflow directly inside ReciPal to reduce stock issues, increase visibility into incoming inventory, and more efficiently log raw materials when they arrive.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to use purchase orders to seamlessly manage your incoming inventory. If you prefer to learn by video, check out this tutorial video:

Why Purchase Orders Matter

As food businesses grow, inventory management gets more complicated quickly.

Without clear purchasing systems, it’s easy to:

• Forget to reorder key ingredients
• Accidentally over-order inventory
• Lose track of incoming shipments
• Receive incorrect quantities without noticing

Purchase Orders solve this by creating a centralized workflow for ordering and receiving inventory. Now you can track the full lifecycle of your purchases:

1. Create a purchase order
2. See what’s incoming
3. Quickly receive inventory into stock

The result is better visibility, fewer mistakes, and a more organized operation.

Create Purchase Orders in Minutes

Creating a Purchase Order inside ReciPal is designed to be simple and fast. You can manually create a purchase order, copy and edit an existing purchase order, or use a production plan to automatically generate a purchase order based on your needs.

Creating a Purchase Order

• From the Purchase Order page, select “New purchase order”
• Enter the estimated arrival date and supplier of your order
• Use the search bar to find the raw materials you want to add to your order
• You can select the “Filter items by supplier” checkbox to only show raw materials associated with that supplier
• Add the quantity and unit of each item ordered
• Optionally, include notes or attachments with documentation about the order (this can also be done during receiving)
• When finished, click “Set active”

Pro Tip 💪: Need to create POs even faster? You can copy and adjust previous orders by using the “Duplicate” button. However, the most powerful option is to automatically generate purchase orders from production plans.

Production plans let you select multiple recipes, set the amount you want to produce of each, and see all the raw materials you’d need to hit those production goals. Now you can create a purchase order directly from the plan.

What Happens When You Set an Order Active

Once you set an order active, it will show the amount of raw materials on order on your raw materials page. This amount will appear next to your on hand inventory in parentheses. It will also factor ordered raw materials into your production plans, but only if the expected receiving date is before the production date.

Receive Inventory Directly Into Stock

When shipments arrive, you can verify you’ve received everything you were supposed to and add details and documentation. Rather than searching and updating each individual ingredient, now you can:

• View all ordered items at once
• Confirm you’ve received the correct amounts (and adjust if needed)
• Enter lot code information, notes, and attachments

Ready to Streamline Purchasing?

If you’re already using ReciPal Inventory, Purchase Orders are designed to make your purchasing workflow faster, cleaner, and easier to manage.

And if you’re still managing purchasing with spreadsheets, email threads, or handwritten notes, now is a great time to centralize your inventory management.

Modern food businesses need visibility into what’s happening across purchasing, production, and inventory in real time. Purchase Orders help bring all of that together.