Friday Features – Footers for Purchase Orders

Purchase orders obviously require copies. Sometimes all you have to do is print one for you and one for the vendor. Sometimes you have to send printed copies to a lot of different departments. Whatever your workflow, Escape Online has got you covered.
Escape Online uses “departments” to give organizations the opportunity to control requisitions, journal entries, invoices and purchase orders separately. Many of our customers will have a Business Department, a Purchasing Department, a Maintenance Department, you get the idea.

Along with defining the documents (requisitions, JEs, et al), the Department record has numerous options for the processing of those documents. In today’s Friday Feature, I want to show you how you can customize the footer of purchase orders.

Check it out. You can see that this LIVE example shows a complex footer. The trick here is the comma. When you define a footer for a purchase order in the Department record, the comma means, “make a separate copy.” See how I have pointed out the first two commas, and that the footer has several department names separated by commas. This means that when you print the PO, Escape Online will print two with no footer, one with the footer “RECEIVING,” one with the footer “ACCOUNTING,” and on and on. This particular customer prints 6 copies of each PO. That may seem like a lot, but Escape Online allows each of our customers to define what is appropriate for their workflow.

Pretty cool, but there’s more. Escape Online collates those copies for you, too! If more than one “group” is defined, Escape Online automatically collates the copies for you. That is, all of the receiving copies print first, then all of the accounting copies, and so on.

By defining PO Copy Options, you are setting up a default footer for printing purchase orders. Next week, we’ll talk about how you can override that default, dynamically changing those footers.

What about emailing, you ask?  Great question! While this mini-series of Friday Features will cover printing POs, we will be introducing the ability to email POs in 2015! Stay tuned.