This article covers the Purchase Orders Resource in detail. If you haven’t yet learned about Resources in general and how to get the most out of them, we suggest you check out our Resources support article first.
What is a Purchase Order?
Purchase Orders in Quickbooks is an expense transaction that represents a request to purchase goods or services from a third party.
Amalgam allows you to create, edit, or delete any data connected with a Purchase Order in Quickbooks, including all of the required fields you see in the “Create Purchase Order” screen in the Quickbooks web interface. Amalgam also allows you to view and modify additional fields that aren’t typically visible in the Quickbooks website.
Filters for Downloading Purchase Orders
When you want to download a group of purchase orders to your worksheet, you can use the filters section (on the left side of the Resource template) to select only the purchase orders you wish to download. These filters are cumulative (so if you make multiple selections, you will get results that fit all filters).
- Vendors: select only Purchase Orders from a specific vendor to download
- Created After: find Purchase Orders created after the specified date
- Created Before: find Purchase Orders created before the specified date
- AP Account: find Purchase Orders from which AP account the bill was credited
- Total Amount Greater Than: find Purchase Orders where the total amount is great than the specified value
- Total Amount Less Than: find Purchase Orders where the total amount is less than the specified value
Purchase Order Data Structure
Purchase orders consist of one purchase order with multiple Purchase Order Lines. Some Purchase Order data applies to the whole purchase order, other data applies only to a specific line. For example, each line may have its own product and dollar amount, but all lines will share the same due date and customer name. You can see how this nested data looks on the template in the video above.
In the Purchase Orders Resource, only the most commonly used fields are visible by default. You will see several hidden columns, indicated by a “+” button at the top of the sheet. By unhiding those columns, you can access several less-common fields.
Note that some of these fields may have formulas in them. These are often used to fetch IDs for Quickbooks data, stuff that is required by the Quickbooks app, but which isn’t important to a user. We caution against changing this data unless you know what you’re doing!
Reference Fields
There will be several fields in each Purchase Order that refer to other Quickbooks data. For example, each Purchase Order is assigned to a Vendor, and that Vendor must exist in Quickbooks. Amalgam makes these references easy for you by providing you with a dropdown list containing all of your options.
If you ever wish to refresh these lists, there is a refresh button on your sidebar that will sync your options with the latest data in Quickbooks. This can be used in conjunction with other Amalgam templates to make edits in Quickbooks without ever leaving Excel or Google Sheets.