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Glossary

Purchase order

A purchase order is the document a buyer issues to commit to a purchase — so the same document is a purchase order to the customer who sends it and becomes a sales order to the distributor who receives it.

Also written
PO

This dual identity is the source of most category confusion. When a distributor says they want to automate purchase orders, they usually mean the customer POs arriving in their inbox, which their own ERP will record as sales orders.

Software for issuing POs (procurement, AP automation) and software for receiving them (order entry automation) are different products from different vendors.

Related terms

Accuracy snapshot

See what it does to your own purchase orders first.

Send 15–25 redacted purchase orders. In 3–5 days you get back what matched, what did not, and why — with every extracted field shown beside the original page. No integration, no ERP access, no workflow change, and no charge.

Request an accuracy snapshotRead how it works