Codes or Descriptions in your Free Purchase Order Software?

Throughout SpendMap, when creating Purchase Orders and working in other areas of the system, you will select master file “codes”, such as GL account codes, item codes (part numbers), supplier codes, etc.

For example, your GL account code for “office supplies” might be “0-663-1”, or something like that, which might not be very meaningful to your SpendMap users.

If you use meaningful codes that make sense to your users, don’t bother reading the rest of this post and just get back to saving your company money or whatever you were doing.

But if your master file codes don’t have meaning to your users, here are some tips to make SpendMap more intuitive for them…

Display Description Instead of Code

Did you know that you can set up SpendMap to display the description rather than the code on screens throughout the system?  Here where you can do that…
– PURCHASING > Setup system > Master file settings > Master file code/description display options

Alternate Between Code and Description

Regardless of whether or not you’re displaying the code or description per above, you can alternate between the code and description at any time using the <F2> key on your keyboard, or you can hover your mouse over a field, like this…

Sorting Look-Up Lists

Drop-down lists can also be sorted either by code or description, using…
– PURCHASING > Setup system > Master file settings > Additional sort options for master file lookups

How to over-receive a PO in your Free Purchase Order Software

To receive more than the quantity ordered, go to the Receiving Screen and double-click on the line item or use the button [Receive line in details mode] to get to the Receiving “Details” Screen.  Enter the quantity, then check the box immediately to the right called “Override PO quantity and close“.

NOTE: In order to over-receive Purchase Orders, the setting “Allow users to over receive Purchase Orders?” must be enabled for the user in the [Permissions] folder of the User Master File.

TIP: Another alternative would be to do a Change Order, that is, you could also modify the quantity of the PO before receiving.  You can learn more in the following section of the Online Help in SpendMap…
– Purchasing (Main Module) > Purchase Orders > Modify a processed PO (About Change Orders)

How to Personalize the Email Messages in your Free Purchase Order Software

Peter from the United Kingdom reached out to us on Facebook to ask if he could personalize the emails that SpendMap creates when sending Purchase Orders to his suppliers…

“Is there a way to create a template email?  Also is there a way that the (PDF file name) can be defined, either to match the PO or have a prefix?”

Yes, there are settings in SpendMap to personalize the email messages, including;

  1. Adding your company name to the “From” field of the email messages,
  2. Adding any text that you want to the body of the email itself, and
  3. You can customize the filename of the PDF document (i.e. the PO itself) to show your company name (or any other prefix), as well as including the PO number in the filename.

All these options are available in the middle of the Email Settings screen, which you can find here…
– PURCHASING > Setup system > e-mail settings


The Online Help for that screen has all the details about how to use those settings, but here’s what your emails might look like, based on the settings used above…

Email Purchase Order

 

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.