Manage confirmed purchase orders: receipts, bills and locking

5 min read Updated 2026-08-30 WindoorERP 19.0

What this does

Once an RFQ becomes a Purchase Order, the work shifts to keeping promises: receive the goods, pay the right bill, and protect the agreed terms. The Purchase Orders menu shows exactly the confirmed documents, with their receipt and billing state at a glance.

Before you start

Receiving needs Inventory access; creating vendor bills lands in Accounting — this article covers the purchase side of both.

Steps

A confirmed purchase order with Vendor Bills and Receipt buttons, received and billed columns per line, and the Purchase Order state

01
Open Purchase › Orders › Purchase Orders — confirmed orders only, with Expected Arrival in red once late.
02
When the truck arrives, open the order and press Receive: the receipt was created at confirmation, and validating it is what turns quantities into Received.
03
Watch the two badges: Receipt Status — Not Received, Partially Received, Fully Received — and Billing Status — Nothing to Bill, Waiting Bills, Fully Billed.
04
Bill it: Upload Bill on the order feeds the vendor's PDF straight into a draft bill; or select orders in the list and press Create Bills; or let accounting pull the order from the bill's Auto-Complete field.
05
Close the loop on dates: the vendor can confirm or amend the arrival date from the emailed order, and the daily reminder mail chases them before the due date.

Why the bill can be empty — Control Policy

Each product carries a Control Policy on its Purchase tab (visible to Purchase administrators): On ordered quantities bills what was ordered; On received quantities — the default for goods — bills only what has been received. With received-based goods, a bill created before the receipt has nothing to pull, and the order shows Waiting Bills only after receiving. That is the built-in protection against paying for undelivered glass; there is no separate 3-way-matching module on WindoorERP.

The dates on a confirmed order

Field	Meaning
Confirmation Date	When it was confirmed — replaces the Order Deadline on the form.
Expected Arrival	The promise. Editable; editing it pushes the new date onto the open receipt. Red in the list once passed.
Arrival	Reality: stamped when the first receipt is validated.
Acknowledged	The vendor has seen the order — set by their click in the emailed portal link, by hand, or automatically when a receipt is validated.
Ask confirmation … day(s) before	The reminder: a daily job emails unacknowledged vendors this many days before the expected arrival; the ✉ button sends yourself a preview.

Changing a confirmed order

Product lines cannot be deleted any more — "Cannot delete a purchase order line which is in state “Purchase Order”." Add corrective lines instead; every added line and changed quantity is logged in the chatter.
Reducing a quantity below what was already billed schedules an activity on the bill: "The quantities on your purchase order indicate less than billed. You should ask for a refund."
With Lock Confirmed Orders enabled in settings, every confirmation locks the order read-only; only a Purchase administrator can Unlock. Without the setting there is no Lock button at all.
Cancel refuses while related vendor bills are open — "You must first cancel their related vendor bills." — and while the order is locked. Cancelling also cancels the open receipt.

Orders the factory created

Production raises its own purchase documents into this same pipeline: Glass PO badges mark orders issued by the production order's glass wizard (one per vendor when tendering), Subcontract PO marks a subcontracted operation's service order, and the Production Order button jumps back to the source. They are ordinary purchase orders — confirm, receive and bill them exactly like the rest; the search view's Glass Purchase Orders and Subcontract Purchase Orders filters keep them separable.

Troubleshooting

Message or symptom	Cause and fix
"Unable to cancel purchase order(s): …. You must first cancel their related vendor bills."	A posted or draft bill hangs on the order — cancel or credit it first.
"Unable to cancel purchase order(s): …. You must first unlock them."	The order is locked; an administrator unlocks, then cancels.
"You can only upload a bill for a single vendor at a time."	The Upload Bill widget builds one bill for one vendor — split the selection.
"You must set a Vendor Location for this partner …"	The vendor's contact record lacks a stock location; confirmation cannot build the receipt without it.
Billing status stuck on Nothing to Bill after confirming	Received-based products with nothing received yet. Receive first; the status moves to Waiting Bills by itself.
No receipt was created	The order holds only services — service lines receive by typing the Received quantity on the line, not through a picking.

Common mistakes

Validating receipts days after the truck left, which delays billing (received-based products) and falsifies the on-time statistics.
Editing Expected Arrival to silence the red date instead of chasing the vendor — the red is the signal that protects production's schedule.
Treating the Glass PO as a special document and inventing a side process — it is a normal order; the only special thing about it is where it came from.

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