(New) Activating a Purchase Order

This section covers the process of activating a purchase order, as well as issues that may arise during the process.

Activating a purchase order does the following:

• Encumbers the Estimated Price for the line items in your funds.
• If the provider is for an EDI vendor, the order is queued up and subsequently sent to the vendor.
• Bib records and on order items are created in the catalog.

In order for a purchase order to be activatable all line items must have the following:

• An estimated price
• At least one item
• A fund
• An owning branch

If anything is missing in any line item, a note will appear in the top of the purchase order. The note will vary depending on what is missing.

Once the purchase order is complete the activation buttons appears.

Options for activation

• Activate Order (button) – When this button is used to activate the purchase order, money is encumbered in the funds and bibs and items are loaded into the catalog. This is the option that is used 99% of the time.
• Activate Without Loading Items (button) – When this button is used to activate the purchase order, money is encumbered in the funds but bibs and items are not loaded into the catalog. Use this option if you want to encumber money in the funds but do not want on order items added to the catalog.
• Allow activation with zero-copy line items (checkbox) – When checked and an estimated price is entered in the line item, the Activate Order button is live even if there are no items associated with the line items. When the purchase order is activated no money is encumbered and nothing is loaded into the catalog.

Activating the Purchase Order

After you click Activate Order you will see a progress bar and will then be taken to the purchase order.

You will need to refresh the screen to see the activated purchase order.

What to do if the activation process doesn’t appear to finish

Sometimes the activation process appears to hang and never finish. Most often, the purchase order was created but the client forgot to tell you about it. To check if your purchase order was actually created, search for recently created purchase orders.

1. Go to Acquisitions => Purchase Orders
2. If not already set, set two search parameters:
   • “Purchase Order – Ordering Agency” “is” “select your library from the dropdown“. NOTE: If you use the system level (BEVERLY for example) select that from the dropdown. If you use the branch level (BEV for example) select that from the dropdown.
   • “Purchase Order – Creation Time” “is” “the current date“.
   • 
3. Click Search.
4. Purchase orders are listed in order of oldest to newest. Click twice on the Creation Time column header to sort the newest to the top of the list.
5. Click on the blue link in the Name column to see the contents of the purchase order.