Life Hack: Save time by adding items to a processed PO without doing a Change Order

As you may know, you can use the Advanced Purchase Order Modification Utility to reload an already processed Purchase Order back into your PO Work Area, where you can modify the order in any way (i.e. add new items to the PO, delete items, or modify/edit existing items).  This is the most common way, but not the only way, to process Change Orders in SpendMap.

But did you know that there is a faster way to add items to your processed Purchase Order?  Just enter a new PO directly into your PO Work Area, as you would any other new PO, and use the same supplier and PO number as the original PO that you want to add to.

When you process the new PO, SpendMap will add a page to the existing (already processed) PO with the new items, and it will increment the PO Revision Number (e.g. PO#1000 will become PO #1000-1 or 1000-A, depending on your settings).

That said, there are additional features and options in the Advanced Purchase Order Modification Utility, so please try both methods to see which one works best for you.

You can learn all about Change Orders, in this section of SpendMap’s Online Help…
– Purchasing (Main Module) > Purchase Orders > Modify a Processed PO (About Change Orders)

change-order-spendmap

Archiving Old Purchase Orders for a Cleaner View

Archive Closed Purchase OrdersPeter works in a state agency in Louisiana and was asking about removing old Purchase Orders from his Open PO list…

“Once a PO is received and closed it should come off the list.”

You can remove received/closed POs from the Open PO list by moving them to the Closed PO Archive, using…
– PURCHASING > Utility > Purge and Archive History > Archived Purchase Orders > Archive closed POs

…or you can use the applicable setting in the [Permissions] folder of the User Master File, to be prompted from time-to-time to archive your close POs when logging into SpendMap.

This will reduce the number of POs that you see in the Look-up List in View PO Status, when printing PO-related reports, etc., making it easier to focus your attention on the remaining (still open) orders.

Please note, however, that running this utility may leave some closed Purchase Orders behind (ie. they will remain in the Open PO list), per the setting “Number of days before closed POs are moved to the Closed PO Archive“, which you can find at the bottom of the screen in here…
– PURCHASING > Setup system> Purchase order settings > PO processing settings

That is, this setting will keep received/closed POs in the Open PO area for the number of days that you specify, as you may have need to access recently closed orders.  Most SpendMap customers set this to between 30 and 90 days.  Peter – set yours to zero (0).

While you can always access your old/closed Purchase Orders even after they have been archived, and while you can even unarchive/restore a PO back into the Open PO area, it may be more convenient for you to just keep, say, a month or two worth of old POs front-and-center, again, if you need to refer to recently closed POs as a regular course of business.

New Tutorial: Prepayment Invoices (e.g. deposits)

If you’re using SpendMap’s Invoice Approval Module to simplify the approval of your suppliers’ invoices, things are going to get even easier with the upcoming 2017 release of SpendMap.  Stay tuned for more information and official release dates.

SpendMap now supports Prepayments, such as deposits and progress payments, to authorize payment to a supplier before the products or services have been delivered.

SpendMap will keep track of the outstanding prepayments when processing subsequent invoices for the Purchase Order, to make sure that you pay the correct amount in the end.

Check out our new video tutorial on Prepayment Invoices and don’t forget to follow this blog (see right sidebar) to be notified when the new release is ready.

Simple Purchase Order Software or Stupid Purchase Order Software?

easy-big-buttonToday Seth Godin wrote about how the desire for “simple” has led to an increase of “stupid” in our society.

But don’t read his blog post (it’s way too long). LOL.

Seth is talking about literature and the media but the same thing is happening with Purchase Order software systems.

In recent years we’ve seen the industry shift from an emphasis on building feature-rich, useful tools that actually solve problems, to a focus on “simple”, “easy”, “fast” and “cheap”.

Let’s be clear, ease-of-use and affordability are important for any business software application these days.  Just not at the expense of usefulness.

So if you’ve tried some of those super-simple PO Software Systems only to find that they barely offer a handful of fields on the Purchase Order entry page (who needs Terms of Payment and Delivery Date fields anyway!), why not take a step back and think through your Purchasing process a bit, then come and take a look at SpendMap’s free Purchase Order Software System.

If there’s anything that our 25 years in this business has taught us, it’s that there needs to be a compromise between “simple” and “useful”.

PS. If Seth’s first blog post, above, is too long, here’s a simpler one.

Free Purchase Order Software is More Popular than Ever

It seems that SpendMap’s Free Purchase Order Software is really catching on.  2016 was our best year ever and there’s still a month to go!

So far just under 100,000 people have visited this Blog from pretty much every country in the world, resulting in around 50,000 downloads so far.

So I think it’s fair to say that you’ll be in pretty good company if you decide to give the free version of SpendMap a try.

Thanks for your support and have a great holiday season!

– Your friends at the Free-Procurement Project

Free purchase order software by country

Update to Fix False Positive Virus Warning on PDF Printer Driver

maintenanceLast week a popular antivirus software system reported a “false positive” related to SpendMap’s PDF printer driver.  That is, the antivirus software reported that SpendMap may contain a virus even though it does not.

The antivirus software company promptly whitelisted SpendMap, which immediately stopped the warning message, but after analyzing the problem we decided to post an update for SpendMap anyway because we can see it happening again.  Here’s why…

The virus software didn’t report that SpendMap actually contains a virus but rather that it MAY have a virus.  It was the antivirus software’s “proactive” threat detection that for some reason didn’t like how SpendMap was invoking our PDF printer driver when previewing reports.  It saw the communication between SpendMap and the printer driver as “suspicious”, and logged it as a potential threat.  No big deal.

But since each antivirus software can deal with “potential” threats differently, we decided that it would be prudent to proactively patch SpendMap to minimize any potential inconvenience to our customers.  For example, while in this case only a warning was displayed and SpendMap kept working, had the antivirus software instead quarantined or deleted any of our systems files, that might have been much harder to recover from.

So, to keep your SpendMap system running smoothly, please use the menu Help > Check For Updates, at your earliest convenience.  This will update your system to version 14.16.11.  You can see which version you are running, using the menu Help > About in SpendMap.

After applying the update, you must run SpendMap as an Administrator on each PC so that it can install the new PDF printer driver.  To do this, simply right-mouse-click on the shortcut/icon that you use to run SpendMap, select “Run as Administrator” from the menu that is displayed, then follow the prompts to install the new printer driver.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

“Add” vs. “Replace” when importing data into your Free Purchase Order Software

Peter works at a hotel/resort in Florida and had a great question about importing data into SpendMap…

“When I import my items, it just keeps adding the new items to the items that are already in the system.  Is there any way to start over and replace everything with the next list of imported items?”

Yes, by default all Master File imports in SpendMap will add to what is already in the Master File.  This is true not only of brand new items, but also new or changed fields for a particular item.  So, for example, you can import the same items over and over again, perhaps to update pricing or other details on an ongoing basis.

But if you’d like to start over, just enable the setting “Allow purging of master files when importing“, in the [Permissions] folder of the User Master File, and then you will see the following prompt the next time you run any of the Master File imports…

import-refresh

What Really Scares Small Businesses? Wasting Money!

The thought of wasting money is pretty scary for most small and medium size businesses.

It’s hard enough to run a successful SMB these days, without having to worry about your staff spending money that they shouldn’t be.

Get control of your company’s spending and see where the money is going, with SpendMap’s free Purchase Order Management Software.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Move line items to another PO in your Free PO Software

To save time, you can “cut” line items from one Purchase Order in your PO Work Area and then “paste” the line items onto a different PO, rather than starting a new Purchase Order from scratch.

Perhaps you made a last-minute decision to use a different supplier for certain products or services or maybe you want the items moved to a different PO for some other reason.

Just use the [Copy/Cut] button at the bottom of the PO Header Screen to “tag” the applicable line item(s)…

Cut PO Line Item

Then move to the other PO and click the [Add] button to add the line items to the bottom of the list.  Or use [Insert] to add the items in between existing items on the PO…

Paste PO Line Items

All of the line item details will be carried forward to the new PO, including all data entry fields, any internal notes and attachments, split-charge account coding details, etc.

TIP: Use the [Copy/Cut] button to tag as many line items as you like, rather than moving them one at a time.