The path a purchase order takes — from a request you approve, through receiving and QC, to a placed lot that traces back to its supplier.
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A truck backs up to your dock on a Tuesday with the rice you ordered three weeks ago. Before a single case goes into a batch, someone has to check what actually came off the truck, confirm it's fit to use, and give it a home your team can find — and if an auditor ever asks, every case has to point back to this delivery and this supplier. Purchasing and receiving are the two halves of that path, and this page walks it end to end. Open Purchase orders beside this page and follow one order from request to shelf.
Buying stock starts with a . You build one against a single vendor and add a line for each product, with its quantity and unit price; the order carries a running total so you can see what you're committing to.
A new order opens as Pending. That's a request, not a commitment — someone with approval authority reviews it and either approves it or rejects it with a reason. Approval is the hinge: an approved order is the only kind you can receive stock against. You can also edit an order that's still pending, or discard one you've decided not to place. None of these erase anything — an approval, a rejection, and a discard are each recorded as their own event, so the order's history reads back in full.
The expected delivery date isn't set in stone
You give an order an expected delivery date when you write it, and you can change it later as the vendor's window moves. Receiving reads the current date to show you what's due and when.
An approved order appears in Receiving, a worklist of every order still waiting on stock, sorted by how far along each one is. When a delivery lands, you open the order and work its lines. A line still waiting on stock reads Ready to receive; you record the quantity that actually came in, the lot number, its manufacture and expiration dates, and — for anything temperature-controlled — the temperature it arrived at. Booking the line in creates a .
What shows up rarely matches the paperwork to the case. You record what was really on the truck, not what was promised, so an order with some lines booked in and others still outstanding reads Partially received until the rest arrives.
Receiving a line doesn't drop it straight into usable stock. Whether it can move on is a quality-control decision.
A receipt lands on a in three cases — the product is set to require QC, the person receiving it asks for a review, or a temperature or shelf-life check fails right at the door. On a held receipt, QC records the temperature and shelf-life checks and then either accepts it — noting the quantity actually approved, which can be less than what arrived — or declines it. A receipt that trips none of those conditions clears on its own and is ready to put away.
A failed cold-chain reading holds itself
When a refrigerated or frozen line comes in warmer than its limit, that reading sends the receipt to QC on its own — it can't be waved through at the dock. A hold there is the system doing its job, not an obstacle to route around.
Once a receipt clears QC, you put it away. is the moment arriving stock becomes real, on-hand inventory. Bettr Manager creates the stock item for the lot, places it in the locations you pick, and posts a stock movement tagged to this purchase order. Before putaway, what came in is a receipt sitting on a dock; after it, the lot is on a shelf with a quantity, an expiry, and a place. If a pallet won't fit in one spot, you can split the same receipt across several locations.
Not everything you receive is worth keeping. When a lot arrives damaged, defective, short, expired, or simply the wrong product, you start a supplier return against the receipt: you pick the lots and quantities and record why they're going back. A return begins as a draft you can still cancel or delete; validating it commits the send-back and takes that stock off hand. What's left is a clean record of what went back to which vendor, and the reason it did.
Set the two halves side by side and you get more than a stack of paperwork. Every lot you put away carries a line straight back to the receipt it arrived on, the purchase order it was bought against, and the vendor who supplied it. That's the difference between a recall you dread and one you run in an afternoon: ask where a lot came from, and the answer is the order you approved weeks earlier. Receiving is where your supply chain turns into something you can follow forward — from a supplier's dock to every batch the lot ends up in.
How those lots then live as on-hand stock — and why every movement is recorded rather than typed over — is the subject of how inventory works.