The World's Best Integrated Business Platform

Purchasing


The business of today requires efficient and easy-to-use Purchase Solutions to be ahead of competition and deliver state-of-the-art customer satisfaction. HansaWorld's Purchase solution does much of the job for you. With document management you can instantly track the origin of a purchase invoice back to the initial purchase order. Documents can be stored in the system as graphical files and be sent and received electronically, saving you time and money.

Purchases can be created automatically from sales orders, based on deficiencys and sales forecasts, making sure you don´t have to worry about capital being tied up in too big stock levels and being just in time.

HansaWorld makes sure your purchases are being sent to the proper warehouse location, as well as telling you where in stock your goods should be stored.

Quality assurance is made easy with serial and batch number tracking.

With HansaWorld's mobile technology and alert management you can be on top of the situation when out of the office, on travel or directly on customer site.

Approval procedures can be set and are handled electronically with either different authorisers (or groups of authorisers), or kept as a single "yes" or "no" to ensure cost control and effiency.

Download Purchasing product sheet (pdf)

Table of Contents


Basic Purchasing Workflow

Where Stock Control and Purchase Order Processing is not an issue, companies can limit purchasing within HansaWorld's purchasing software solution to raising a Purchase Invoice, and then making a Payment against that Purchase Invoice. Alternatively the sequence will be to raise a Purchase Order, book a Goods Receipt against the Purchase Order, and then raise a Purchase Invoice from the Purchase Order. More complex variations are covered below.

Items

Enterprise as purchasing software solution has two separate tables to allow you to keep track of the Items you are buying. The Item register retains details relating to the sales process, and costings. The Purchase Item register allows you to set up multiple records per item you sell, for each supplier you buy that Item from. Data from this register is used for several specific tasks:


Purchase Orders

As with other parts of HansaWorld, you can select an existing Purchase Order, and copy the details into a new Purchase Order. These details can be edited in any way before saving. The Purchase Order itself allows you to request the delivery date (for the whole order or per line), and to specify the payment terms for the eventual invoice from the supplier.

On Purchase Orders, Enterprise as purchasing software solution keeps track of the quantities of ordered items that have been received, that have been accepted as received, and that have been invoiced. You can enter a different company in HansaWorld’s factoring field, to allow you to record the eventual purchase invoice against a different company from the supplier.

Enterprise as purchasing software solution provides a report that allows you to view all unfulfilled purchase orders, and/or all those that have been partially received. In addition, there is a menu function that allows you to close any selection of purchase orders - any quantities that have not been received will be cancelled. Other reports allow you to display committed cost, or create an accrual for purchase orders not received, by showing such items sorted by Nominal code.

Goods Receipts

Recording goods receipts could not be simpler: pick the purchase orders against which goods have been received, and select Goods Received from the Operations Menu. This creates the relevant goods receipt records, and copies the ordered number of items. For partial receipts, the Purchase Order is not marked as received until the entire order has been received. For more complex consignment handling, it is possible to pick several whole Purchase Orders or separate Purchase Order rows on a Goods Receipt. In this example, the workflow changes so that a Purchase Invoice can be recorded directly from the Goods Receipt, rather than from the Purchase Orders.

Suppliers’ Invoices

Raising suppliers’ invoices when purchase orders are already on the system is extremely easy: select any purchase order for which an invoice has been received, and select Invoice from the Operations Menu. This creates a new editable supplier’s invoice copying the details from the purchase order. Enterprise as purchasing software solution supports discounts taken from suppliers, recorded directly at the purchase invoice stage. You can specify a factor number for the supplier. Purchase credits are created by copying a purchase invoice, and changing the
payment terms to credit.

Reordering

Enterprise as purchasing software solution has various reports and automated routines to assist in the reordering process. Purchases Motivated by Stock Levels Minimum stock levels can be recorded per Item (for single Location companies), or per Item per Location, and normal (and minimum) purchase order quantities can be set up per Item per Supplier. HansaWorld provides a Purchasing Suggestion report, which lists for each item the number in stock, the number on sales orders, the net of these two, the number on unfulfilled purchase orders, and a suggestion for the number to reorder, based on the item’s minimum stock level - but also taking the normal purchase order quantity into account. HansaWorld also provides a batch function to create Purchase Orders for all items below their minimum stock levels, or for any range of such items. If more than one supplier exists for an item, HansaWorld will pick whichever has been specified as the default supplier.

On Purchase Orders, Enterprise as purchasing software solution keeps track of the quantities of ordered items that have been received, that have been accepted as received, and that have been invoiced. You can enter a different company in HansaWorld’s factoring field, to allow you to record the eventual purchase invoice against a different company from the supplier. HansaWorld provides a report that allows you to view all unfulfilled purchase orders, and/or all those that have been partially received. In addition, there is a menu function that allows you to close any selection of purchase orders - any quantities that have not been received will be cancelled. Other reports allow you to display committed cost, or create an accrual for purchase orders not received, by showing such items sorted by Nominal code.

Purchases Motivated by Stock Levels

Minimum stock levels can be recorded per Item (for single Location companies), or per Item per Location, and normal (and minimum) purchase order quantities can be set up per Item per Supplier. HansaWorld provides a Purchasing Suggestion report, which lists for each item the number in stock, the number on sales orders, the net of these two, the number on unfulfilled purchase orders, and a suggestion for the number to reorder, based on the item’s minimum stock level - but also taking the normal purchase order quantity into account. HansaWorld also provides a batch function to create Purchase Orders for all items below their minimum stock levels, or for any range of such items. If more than one supplier exists for an item, HansaWorld will pick whichever has been specified as the default supplier.

Purchases Motivated by Actual Sales

Enterprise as purchasing software solution provides a batch routine for the creation of “back to back” orders, raising Purchase Orders automatically from Sales Orders. The routine allows the user to select any range of Orders (selecting by date range, order number or order type), and to determine if there will be one Purchase Order for each Sales Order (for example for easier traceability) or requirements from multiple Sales Orders will be grouped onto a single Purchase Order per supplier. It can also be run for a single Sales Order, without requiring a selection by the user. Customer address details can be transferred automatically to Purchase Orders created in this way. The user determines whether to take account of stock levels when running this routine. For “just-in-time” purchasing, HansaWorld provides a similar routine which also takes account of the planned delivery date, and the lead time which can be specified per item per supplier. This creates forward-dated Purchase Orders, using similar logic to the “back to back” routine described above. It can be run in conjunction with Productions - for more details, see HansaWorld and Production.

There is a more complex report to drive purchasing based on a combination of actual sales and required stock levels. This allows the user to specify any date range, and the number of months of sales for which stock should be held. The report compares a stock forecast (stock plus purchase orders less sales orders) to a predicted sales figure (actual monthly sales for the selected period times number of months specified), and derives a reordering suggestion which also takes account of minimum stock levels and purchase order quantities. There is a batch routine which can be run in the same way as the report, which automatically creates Purchase Orders for the quantities suggested by the report.

Purchases Motivated by Forecast Sales

Enterprise as purchasing software solution includes an entire module to assist in this aspect of the purchasing process. This enables you to make a temporary capture of the current stock position, and forward sales and purchase order books, including anticipated dates for delivery and receipt of stock. These entries are editable, to allow more precise control of the “actual” position against which purchasing requirements will be determined. Next, you can forecast sales for each item and location, with reference to the supplier from whom you will order each item.

The actual purchasing decisions will be underpinned by detailed reporting of forward stock movements. These reports show transactions for each day where there are forward orders: they calculate the forward stock levels by adding expected receipts (on expected goods receipt dates) and subtracting expected deliveries (on expected delivery dates) from the actual stock level, and ending up with a purchasing suggestion. Drilldown gives more details on order dates compared to delivery dates. Users can edit underlying records and rerun the reports until satisfied. The report includes a break point at which the forecast order data is used rather than actual sales orders.

Users can then run a batch routine to create Purchase Orders from the purchasing suggestion derived above, on a range of selection criteria - for example the routine can be restricted to a range of items, or requirements for a specific location.

Tendering

If you invite suppliers to tender for work, you can record their Quotations in HansaWorld. Enterprise as purchasing software solution allows the automatic creation of a Purchase Order from the winning tender. For more complex situations, HansaWorld provides process control, whereby you can track when documents such as pre-qualifications, bids and contracts are sent and received back. These can be grouped by tender, and can be allocated to Purchase Order Quotations.

Scheduled Orders

Enterprise as purchasing software solution provides a PO Contract register, which allows a complete purchasing contract to be entered, with a complete schedule of when orders are planned to be called off. Purchase Orders can be raised at any time from the PO Contract, and issued to the supplier in the normal way. HansaWorld maintains a count on the PO Contract of what has been ordered, and also keeps the eventual Purchase Invoice number.

Supplier Returns

Items can be returned to suppliers, for whatever reason, from either the original Purchase Order or the Goods Receipt. You can choose whether you expect to receive these items again from the supplier, As with all other features, HansaWorld keeps up to date the count of how many items were ordered, how many have been received, and how many have been
invoiced.

Requisitions

Enterprise as purchasing software solution provides an Internal Order register for departments to make requests for stocked items, primarily for internal use. The Internal Orders can be authorised or declined. Once authorised, the stock can be moved to the relevant Location by means of an automatic stock transfer (Stock Movement) or stock write-off (Stock Depreciation).

Jobs

To allocate purchase orders and invoices to jobs, enter the job number in the order’s (or invoice’s) project number field.

Fixed Assets

A command on the Operations Menu of the Purchase Ledger module provides a simple method of capitalising asset purchases. If you have highlighted a purchase invoice, it automatically creates the necessary asset record in the Fixed Assets Module.