Importing Order Items into a Purchase Order

This video shows the process of importing order items into a purchase order using our software. This process makes your life easier because this way you can import POs instead of inputting them all by hand.

From Excel, it’s as simple as copying and pasting in the order to import them into our system. See the video below to seen an illustration of the process of  importing order items into a purchase order.

Importing Order Items into a Purchase Order

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Video Transcription

Hello, this is Mike, Finale Inventory. In this short video, we’re gonna cover importing items into a purchase order so that you don’t have to create super large purchase orders by hand, you can actually do it by importing them. So, let’s take a look at Finale here. From the home screen, we’ll go to view purchases. So I’ve already created a test import purchase order. So, I’m gonna go to this purchase order and we’re going to import items into the purchase order. A key thing here is the purchase order must be in an editable state in order to be imported into. So, the next step we’re going to do is we’re gonna go to the action menu and then go to import items, order items. So, let’s click on that. That’s gonna bring up the familiar Paste Here screen that allows you to paste from, say, a copy-paste from Excel.

So, let’s go and open up…or before we go to open an Excel, take a look at the columns that we need to look at. So, we certainly need a product ID of which we’re going to purchase on the purchase order. We would also need a quantity. Now there’s a quantity field and a case quantity field. If you are gonna do a purchase order for open order or open items or eaches, then you would use the quantity field. If you’re going to do a purchase order in case quantities, you would use the case quantity field to bring in your order. Now, of course, if you bring in case quantity, you would also might want to be using the packing field if you’re gonna bring in a new packing, something that’s different than the standard packing that may be defined on the product ID. But we’ll go over both scenarios.

So, let’s go look at our Excel sheet. So I’ve got a basic Excel sheet here for importing order items into a purchase order.  It’s got a column for product ID and a column for quantity. So I’m just gonna copy these two columns, and I’m gonna be able to import them into the purchase order. So, I’m just gonna hit Copy, go right here, and we’re going to hit Paste. So, Finale easily recognized and picks up the product IDs that we wish to order, and the different quantities that we’re gonna order on this purchase order. Just hit Next and Commit and look at that, we’ve got a fully populated purchase order with the category and a description, the product ID that we entered in, and we have over here all of the quantities. Now, if you notice, it came in without a price. So, this would be for many reasons, either we don’t have a buy price set up in the database, so, it didn’t populate with a buy price or we, of course, we didn’t specify a supplier, so, it wouldn’t pull the supplier pricing either.

Now, you can import in a price by which you want to pay on this purchase order. So you would just simply add that column to your copy-paste. So, let’s go back to the copy-paste. If you look here, I don’t have a column for unit price. So, I’m gonna unhide that column and here’s the unit price. So, I can just go ahead and copy this information again and add the price at which I’m gonna be maybe paying this into my copy. And then I can come back over here, and I can reimport those items with the unit price. So this time I have a unit price that I’m gonna be paying for on the purchase order. So, I can just do that, and I can bring that in. And now the price is there.

So let’s talk about if you are not ordering in eaches or open, maybe you’re ordering by the case. So, we would need to specify case quantity instead of a quantity field and also a packing. I know my pack…my products here don’t have a standard packing. So, I’m gonna bring that packing in as well on the copy-paste. So, once again, I can go back to the spreadsheet. I actually happen to have the other fields here. So, I’m gonna unhide them here, and I’ve got a case quantity and a packing. So, I don’t need this quantity field, all right? So I’m just gonna hide this quantity field. And, I’m now gonna bring this purchase order in as if I’m ordering in cases. So, I’ve got my case quantity field, a packing, and the product ID. That’s the key. So, let’s go back, let’s reimport this purchase order and we’re going to use it in case terms now. So, now that we paste it, you’ll see that it recognizes the case quantity, the packing, the unit price and so on. So, as I bring those in, you’ll see that now how Finale is recognizing that these are actually cases, and it also pulled in that the packing. So that’s as easy as it is to create one by importing order items into a purchase order from an Excel sheet using our very familiar copy-paste.