Set up purchase orders and migrate existing POs to Sumtracker

Purchase orders in Sumtracker let you raise POs with suppliers, track them through to receiving, and keep your stock and landed costs up to date automatically. This article walks you through creating your first PO and configuring the settings that control how POs behave.

Create a purchase order

To create a purchase order, go to Purchase Orders and click New PO.

We recommend creating a couple of test POs first to get comfortable with the flow before raising one with a real supplier.

Receiving items and inventory sync

When stock arrives from your supplier, and you receive the items through a receive note, Two things happen automatically:

• Inventory is updated on your store. If inventory sync is turned on for the relevant channel, the received quantities are pushed to your store as soon as you mark them received — no manual update needed.
• Landed cost is updated. Sumtracker recalculates the landed cost of each product based on what you actually paid on the PO (including any additional costs you've added). Landed cost is updated on marking the receive note as “Final”

Purchase order settings

You'll find all PO-related settings under Settings → Purchase Order Settings.

PO numbering

PO numbers are auto-generated. You can customise the numbering format — including the prefix and the starting number — from Purchase Order Settings.

If you need to attach your own internal reference number to a PO (for example, a number from your accounting system), use the Reference field on the PO details page. This is separate from the auto-generated PO number.

Footer terms and print format

You can set up the footer text (terms and conditions, payment instructions, etc.) and the print options (printing supplier SKUs, barcodes, prices) for your POs from Purchase Order Settings. These will appear on every PO you print or email to suppliers.

Cost sync to Shopify

If you want Sumtracker to push the updated landed cost of products back to Shopify after receiving a PO, go to Settings → Cost Sync Settings and set the cost sync setting to Push.

With this turned on, every time a PO receipt changes the landed cost of a product, Sumtracker updates the cost field in Shopify automatically.

Printing labels for received products

If you'd like to print barcode or product labels for items as you receive them, set up your label template under Settings → Product Labels. Once configured, you'll be able to print labels directly from the PO receiving screen.

Migrating existing purchase orders to Sumtracker

If you have open or historical purchase orders in another system, our team can bulk import them for you from a CSV file.

What you need to do

• Prepare your CSV using our sample format. You can download it from here.
• Make sure all mandatory columns are included (see below).
• Make sure the suppliers and warehouses referenced in the file already exist in Sumtracker. Warehouses must not be archived.
• Limit each file to 5,000 rows. If you have more, split them into multiple files.

Once your file is ready, email it to our support team as an attachment and we'll import the purchase orders for you.

Mandatory columns

• po_number
• contact_code — supplier code, must already exist in Sumtracker
• warehouse_code — must exist and not be archived
• status — either CLOSED or INCOMING
• sku
• quantity
• confirmation_date — format YYYY-MM-DD
• expected_arrival_date — format YYYY-MM-DD

How rows map to POs

• Each row in the file represents one PO line item.
• Rows that share the same po_number are grouped into a single purchase order. So a PO with five line items will be five rows in the file, all with the same po_number.