You create a purchase invoice or purchase order to record the cost of purchases and to track accounts payable. If you need to control an inventory, purchase invoices are also used to dynamically update inventory levels so that you can minimize your inventory costs and provide better customer service. The purchasing costs, including service expenses, and inventory values that result from posting purchase invoices contribute to profit figures and other financial KPIs on your Role Center.
You must use purchase orders if your purchasing process requires that you record partial receipts of an order quantity, for example, because the full quantity was not available at the vendor. If you sell items by delivering directly from your vendor to your customer, as a drop shipment, then you must also use purchase orders. For more information, see Make Drop Shipments. In all other aspects, purchase orders work the same way as purchase invoices.
You can have purchase invoices created automatically by using the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) service to convert PDF invoices from your vendors to electronic documents, which are then converted to purchase invoices by a workflow. To use this functionality, you must first sign up for the OCR service, and then perform various setup. For more information, see Process Incoming Documents.
Products can be both inventory items and services. For more information, see Register New Items.
For all purchase processes, you can incorporate an approval workflow, for example, to require that large purchases are approved by the accounting manager. For more information, see Using Approval Workflows.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
| To | See |
|---|---|
| Create a purchase invoice to record your agreement with a vendor to purchase products on certain delivery and payment terms. | Record Purchases |
| Create a purchase quote to reflect a request for quote from your vendor, which you can later convert to a purchase order. | Request Quotes |
| Create a purchase invoice for all or selected lines on a sales invoice. | Purchase Items for a Sale |
| Perform an action on an unpaid posted purchase invoice to automatically create a credit memo and either cancel the purchase invoice or recreate it so you can make corrections. | Correct or Cancel Unpaid Sales Invoices |
| Create a purchase credit memo to revert a specific posted purchase invoice to reflect which products you are returning to the vendor and which payment amount you will collect. | Process Purchase Returns or Cancellations |
| Prepare to invoice multiple receipts from the same vendor once by combining the receipts on one invoice. | Combine Receipts on a Single Invoice |
| Convert, for example, electronic invoices from your vendors to purchase invoices inside Business Central. | Receive and Convert Electronic Documents |
| Learn how Business Central calculates when you must order an item to receive it on a certain date. | Date Calculation for Purchases |
| Resolve confusion when two or more records exist for the same vendor. | Merge Duplicate Records |
Setting Up Purchasing
Register New Vendors
Managing Payables
Managing Projects
Working with Business Central
General Business Functionality
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