Receiving inventory on purchase orders

How and when to receive inventory on purchase orders, and how to push received stock to your store.

Monica avatar
Written by Monica
Updated over a week ago

Upon receiving a shipment from your vendor, you will need to receive the items on the purchase order.

If you are connected to an inventory management system, orders can be pushed from Inventory Planner to your IMS, allowing you to receive orders directly through there. On receiving an order your IMS will adjust your stock, and Inventory Planner will update the stock quantity upon the next sync.

Note that using a CSV integration will require updating stock levels in your 'products' file. Receiving a purchase order with the CSV integration will not update your stock levels.

For sales platform integrations, you must receive items and close purchase orders so that variants listed will no longer be considered on order. The same methods for receiving purchase orders described here also apply to warehouse transfers.

Items on order

Unreceived items on purchase orders with a status of OPEN or PARTIALLY RECEIVED will be considered on order.

If an item has been received on a partially received purchase order, then only unreceived items are considered on order. Received items will no longer be considered on order.

When to receive in Inventory Planner

If you are connected to an inventory management system (such as QuickBooks Commerce or Skubana) or Amazon, then you will receive items on purchase orders through that platform. Information about the receipt including the number of units received and the purchase order status will be updated in Inventory Planner after the next sync with your connected platform.

If you are connected to a sales platform such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or Magento, then you will handle receiving in Inventory Planner.

Options to receive a purchase order include:

  • Typing received quantities into the purchase order and saving

  • “Receive All”

  • Uploading received quantities to a purchase order

  • Using a barcode scanner

  • Uploading a purchase order including received quantities (where the purchase order does not exist in Inventory Planner)

Type received quantities into the purchase order and save

You can type received quantities directly into the purchase order information in Inventory Planner.

After you've entered the received amount, click “Save” at the bottom of the page.

You will then see a date stamp and further detail in the “Received History” column, displaying when and how many units were received.

“Receive Remaining” (including “Receive All”)

If you are sent all items on the purchase order in one shipment or if you have received all the remaining items on a partially received purchase order, you can use the “Receive Remaining” button at the top right-hand side of the screen.

The number of units shown in the “Remaining” column will then populate the “To Receive” field for each row.

Once you “Save Changes” at the bottom of the screen, your purchase order status will automatically change to Closed.

Upload received quantities to a purchase order

If you have a spreadsheet of received quantities, you can upload it to update a purchase order. First, enter the purchase order, then click on Receive > Upload Received from File.

You will need the following information in a spreadsheet, including a title for each field:

  • SKU, or other identifying information for the product on the PO, e.g. barcode, title, ID, vendor reference (supplier SKU). This identifier must be unique. For example, if you have two items with the exact same product title, then you should not use “Title” as your identifier.

  • Received quantities

  • Arrival date in yyyy-mm-dd format (Optional)

  • Ordered quantities (Optional)

When your file is ready, click either drag it into the upload area or click the upload area to upload it.

Then click "Map columns" to match up your column titles with the corresponding field in the import manager.

When you've selected the correct fields, click “Import” at the bottom of the import manager.

You will then see a confirmation message including details about the data updated or any errors produced.

Use a barcode scanner

If you would like to scan items while receiving to ensure the right products are received, then you can use a barcode scanner.

You will need to be sure that all items on your purchase order have barcode information populated in Inventory Planner.

First, navigate to Receive > Use Barcode Scanner.

Using a scanner attached to your computer, scan the received item. As you scan items, you will see the information populated in the Inventory Planner preview.

Once all items are scanned, click Save to enter the received quantities.

Troubleshooting receiving using a barcode scanner

  1. Make sure that your barcode scanner is compatible with the type of barcode you are scanning. EAN8, EAN13, UPCA, and Code 128 are common formats for barcodes, but not all scanners will be able to read each of these formats.

  2. If you are creating labels including barcodes from Inventory Planner, then receiving using your barcode scanner will correspond with the information in the 'barcode' field in your account. Although Inventory Planner allows you to use other fields such as SKU, FNSKU, and Vendor Reference to create barcodes, receiving using a scanner will only correspond to the barcode field.

Upload a purchase order including received quantities

To import a purchase order or transfer from a spreadsheet:

  1. Create a spreadsheet containing the following information, including column titles:

  • An identifier to match products: SKU, title, ID, vendor reference, or barcode. (Required)

  • Quantity ordered (required)

  • Vendor name (optional)

  • Received quantity if the ordered products have already arrived and been added to inventory (optional)

  • PO created date (optional)

  • PO arrival date (optional)

  • Cost price (optional)

  • Landing cost price (optional)

  • PO number to differentiate purchase orders. If not provided then POs are distinguished by arrival date. (Optional)

  • Date, format yyyy-mm-dd (optional)

2. Go to the Stock Orders section from the left side menu.

3. At the bottom of the screen, click Import > Stock Orders.

4. Make sure your spreadsheet has a column for "received quantity". Once you're happy with it, import your saved spreadsheet by dragging it into the upload area, or clicking on the upload area and locating it. Then click "Map columns".

5. Inventory Planner will match columns with your column names when possible. For other columns of information, you will need to select the correct column title to match the information type for import.

6. When all column names have been matched to their information field, click “Import” at the bottom of the screen.

You will then see a confirmation message including details about the data updated or any errors produced.

Receiving and purchase order statuses

If you received some, but not all, of the items on a purchase order, then the purchase order’s status will change to Partially Received.

If you received the same number of items that were ordered, your PO status will update to Closed.

If you only received some of the ordered items and aren’t expecting to receive the rest, you will need to indicate that the purchase order is Closed. To do this, click “Actions” at the top of the purchase order screen, then “Close”.

Closing a partially received purchase order doesn’t increase the items’ received quantities, but ensures outstanding items are no longer considered 'on order' for the purposes of calculating the replenishment recommendation.

Pushing inventory to your store

Inventory Planner provides the ability to push received inventory quantities to your eCommerce platform (Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Neto, and Prestashop).

After you’ve received the items, you will see the option to “Increase stock in X”, where X is your connected eCommerce platform.

In the pop-up, you'll see variants that have been received, the current stock level (as of the last sync), what the stock will be after adding received quantities, and any quantities previously updated in your store from this purchase order.

Select the items whose inventory you want to push, then click “Update selected”.

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