Materials and POs
Everything bought for this job. Items group into lists, and a purchase order is raised from a list.
Everything the job is made of lives here: what you need, what you have asked for, and what has been ordered. It is one screen because those are three states of the same thing, not three jobs.
Items, lists, orders
An item on its own does nothing. It is a line: a part, a quantity, a spec. It sits in the job, and nothing happens to it.
A list is the unit of work. It is what you send to vendors for quotes, and what you raise a purchase order from. Group items into a list the way you would group them onto one order: by vendor, by phase, by delivery.
If the metal is already here, do not Raise PO. On a job list use Already purchased. For facility stock use Order Stock with Already in hand. Raise PO only starts an order that still has to arrive.
Lists nest into sublists. A big assembly can be one list with a sublist per subassembly, so the structure of the order matches the structure of the work.
When you know the part, not the list
All Items is everything on this job in one flat view. It exists for the moment you can remember the part but not which list you filed it under, which is most of the time once a job has a dozen lists.
Search from there rather than opening lists one at a time.
Raising the order
A purchase order comes off a list. Once raised, the line is real: it appears in Stock and deliveries as on order, and it can be linked to a task in the planner so the work cannot start before the material lands.
- Add items to the job
- Group them into a list, by vendor or by delivery
- Send the list out for quotes
- Raise the purchase order from the list
Linking material to work
Attach a purchase order line to a task and the task can no longer start before the expected delivery date. Order material to land early and nothing moves; let it slip and the task follows.
That link is what turns a delivery date into a schedule date. See How a task gets its dates.