Purchasing — Documentation | Stocklyst

Purchasing

Suppliers, purchase orders, goods receipts, and resolving provisional items.

Turning Purchasing On

Purchasing is off until a workspace owner switches it on: Settings > Workspace > Features > Purchasing. The Purchasing section then appears in the sidebar.

Access is granted per person under Settings > Team. Owners always have all four.

Permission	What it allows
View purchase orders	See the purchase order and supplier lists
Manage orders & suppliers	Create and edit suppliers; create, edit, order, cancel and close purchase orders
Receive goods	Book deliveries against an order
Resolve provisional items	Decide what an unidentified item actually was

Suppliers

Purchasing > Suppliers > Add supplier. Name is the only required field; contact details, currency, default lead time and notes are optional.

Note: Suppliers are never deleted — deactivate one instead. It keeps every order that references it and drops out of the pickers.

Raising a Purchase Order

Purchasing > New order
Pick the supplier and the destination branch (and a zone, if deliveries always land in the same place)
Add lines — up to 200 per order
Set an expected date and any notes for the supplier
Save it as a draft, or mark it as ordered when it goes out

A line can point at an item you already stock, or it can just describe what you are buying — a part number off the supplier quote is enough. Both kinds can sit on the same order.

Drafts are fully editable and can be deleted. Once an order is marked as ordered, only notes, the expected date, the supplier reference and the destination zone can change — cancel or close it instead of rewriting what was ordered.

Importing Lines From a Spreadsheet

On the new order screen, use Import to bring the supplier's own order file in. Download the template first if you want the exact column names.

sku, barcode, description, vendor_ref, application, quantity, unit_cost, notes

Rows are matched against your catalog by SKU first, then barcode. A row that matches becomes a normal line; a row that does not becomes a described line, which is exactly what you want for parts you have never bought before.

Provisional Items

When you mark an order as ordered, every line that has no catalog item gets a placeholder — a provisional item — so there is something to receive stock against. Each one gets a machine-assigned SKU beginning with PRV-.

PRV- is reserved. You cannot type it into a SKU or set it as your workspace SKU prefix.
Provisional items hold real stock but stay out of item lists, search, reports and the mobile app until they are resolved.
They are counted against your plan item limit, because each one uses a real row and a real SKU.

Receiving Goods

Open the order and click Receive. Enter what actually arrived line by line, choose the zone it lands in, and note the condition if anything is damaged. Stock moves the moment you confirm.

Deliveries can be partial — receive again when the rest turns up.
A photo is required when you are receiving against a provisional item, since the photo is often the only record of what the box held. Workspaces that cannot photograph deliveries can turn that off.
Receiving more than was ordered needs a deliberate confirmation.
A repeated submission from a flaky connection never lands the stock twice.

Resolving Provisional Items

Once the goods are in front of you, say what they were. Resolve from the receiving screen, or from the order detail next to the line.

Action	Use it when
Promote	It is its own product. The placeholder becomes a real item with the SKU and name you give it.
Merge	You already stock it. The stock moves onto that item and the placeholder disappears into it.
Split	The box held more than one thing. Divide the stock into new items, one for each thing you found. Splitting only creates new items — to move the whole quantity onto an item you already stock, use Merge instead.
Cancel	It never arrived, or it went straight back. Stock is only written off if you explicitly say so.

Note: Resolving is final and happens once. If two people resolve the same item at the same moment, the second is told it has already been resolved rather than doing it twice.

Closing an Order

Cancel an order that has received nothing. Once any stock has landed, short-close it instead — that says the rest is never coming while keeping the delivery history. Provisional items on lines that received nothing are cancelled with it; ones holding stock stay in the queue until someone identifies them.

Transfers

Import Data