I handle about 75% of the purchases we make with our suppliers here in our office. I was kind of tossed into this position a few years ago and was never really taught anything about working in an office.
I have always used this way of logging our PO’s because it’s what everyone here has always done.
I basically have a google sheets spreadsheet called PO LOG and have 4 other users that I’ve invited. One being our assistant, one being a project manager, one for the person that does all the accounting / financial records, and one for another assistant. We just use a number (currently on PO number 60450) and what I did (on the fly) was just create a new sheet for each user that included their own set of PO numbers. That way we didn’t accidentally use the same PO numbers on anything. Sometimes I’ll give a PO number to a supplier for a purchase and not fill it in until later.
But it’s getting hard to keep track of and we started overlapping PO numbers without realizing it. Like if one user has numbers 30000-32000, and another has 32001-34000, and the first user runs out of PO numbers, it’s either a pain in the neck or I just forget that 32001 is already being used.
Apologies if this sounds somewhat confusing. Hard to put it into words haha. I’m basically just looking to see if anyone knows of a program or something that will just automatically create PO numbers and I can just use custom fields. I can only seem to find programs that create an actual Purchase Order with our logo and everything else on it. I don’t need that, I just need a log like a spreadsheet. I just have columns set up like this (Date) (PO Number) (Job Name) (JobCostCode) (Purchased From) (Short Description of Items) (Order Number) (Subtotal of Order).
I just use the order number to go back and look at the details if I need to. And our person that does the accounting/financial stuff enters all the order info in a separate program she uses.
I just want something simple that will log PO’s and make sure we don’t double a PO number or anything having multiple users. And I didn’t want to have to come up with a new system using Google Sheets.
So if anyone has any tips/suggestions, that would be greatly appreciated!
p.s. sorry for the essay! I’m kind of all over the place with the explanation of this one haha.
Thanks!