Purchasing Overview

Use the Purchasing application to keep electronic records of both internal and project-related procurement and receiving of services, materials, supplies, and capital items.

Your firm can use Purchasing whether you have a central purchasing office or perform purchasing work in many different offices.

Configuration and Security Considerations

Before you can use the Purchasing application, a system administrator must specify the configuration options in Configuration > Purchasing & Inventory.

Purchasing security is at the menu level only.

  • To enable security for Purchasing, make the purchasing application active in Configuration > Module Activation.
  • To specify the Purchasing menu items for a security role, use the Purchasing menu check boxes on the General Tab of Configuration > Security > Roles.

To create vouchers from purchase orders, the employee's security role must have security access to Accounting > Accounts Payable > Create Voucher from PO on the General tab of Configuration > Security > Roles.

Approval Process in Purchasing

You decide whether or not to use an approval process for purchase requisitions, request for price quotes, purchase orders, change orders, release orders, and inventory item requests. You create approval workflows that specify the steps, approvers, and notification alerts for an approval process in Configuration > Approvals > Approvals Configuration. In Configuration > Purchasing & Inventory > Company Settings, you enable approvals individually for each Purchasing application, and you assign an approval workflow.

Status Codes

The status of the following items are tracked to tell you where a purchasing transaction is in its processing cycle:

  • Purchase Orders
  • Requisitions and Requests for Price Quote
  • Line Item Orders
  • Line Item Receiving

Multicurrency

If you use the Multicurrency feature:

  • You can create a purchase order from more than one purchase requisition and request for price quote. They must all be in the same transaction currency.
  • Vision uses the functional currency of the active company to compare and apply buyers' purchasing limits and approvers' approval limits. Vision also uses the functional currency to keep the limits in the database.

Multicompany

If you use the Multicompany feature:

  • Each purchasing record is owned by a specific company. The list of available purchasing records displays the ones that belong to the active company.
  • Vendor Info Center records are available to all companies.
  • Purchase requisitions and requests for price quote are available if the vendor's Info Center record has accounting set up for the active company.

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