A purchase order records what you’ve ordered. When the pieces arrive you receive the order, and each piece becomes an inventory item carrying its cost, specs, stones and images.
Purchase orders live under Inventory → Stock Orders, the shared list of everything coming into stock.
Two kinds of order
+ New Purchase Order is what you send a vendor for goods you’re buying in.
+ New Production Order is a run of your own house designs — work you’re sending to a caster, or doing at the bench. It behaves the same way, but it calls itself a Production Order everywhere it appears, including on the printed and emailed document, and it leaves the design’s description off the lines: the style number and metal color are what identify a run.
If you start the wrong one, change Order type on the order itself. Nothing else has to be re-keyed.
What a line is
Every line names a design from your Style Catalog, or is a one-off.
A design carries its own metal, size and finish, so a line that names one is already specific enough to ship and to cost — nothing is left to decide at the moment the piece is received and its prices are calculated, which is exactly where a guess does the most damage.
Adding lines
Three ways in, in the order you’ll use them:
Type or scan the style number. The box at the top of the lines panel. Enter the number and it resolves as you type; press Enter, set the quantity, Enter again — that’s the whole interaction.
When a number matches several designs, the box lists them — metal, color, size and cost each — and waits. Add line stays disabled until you pick one. Nothing is committed on a guess.
Browse styles. For when you don’t have the number to hand. Search by style number, description or category, tick what you want, and set a metal color and a quantity on each row. One pass builds as many lines as you need.
The color opens on the design’s own, which is a suggestion rather than an answer — the same design is run in white one week and yellow the next, and this is where you say which. It stays editable on the line afterwards, and it shows in its own column on the order so you can check the whole run at a glance before it goes out.
+ One-off item. For anything not in your catalog. Enter a description and/or the vendor’s style number, plus quantity, type and cost each. Those last two matter: a catalog line gets its cost and category from the design behind it, and a one-off has no design, so what you type here is what the received piece will carry.
Changing a line
Click the quantity on any line to edit it in place. You can’t go below what’s already been received against that line.
How much metal the run needs
Under the lines, the order totals the metal it will consume — gold, silver, and anything else — in your own weighing unit, quantity included. It reads each design’s recipe, so a design made of two metals counts both.
A metal the order doesn’t use isn’t listed. Designs with no weight recorded contribute nothing, so the total is what you’ve actually weighed and no more.
Sending the order
Documents on the order gives you Print, Email, Share and Download PDF. Each line on the document shows the design’s main photo, the style number, the gold colors the piece is made in, its primary color, the quantity and any note typed on the line. The metal totals follow the lines. The photo column is left off when none of the designs on the order has a photo.
It carries no cost or prices. It tells a caster or a vendor what to make; your cost is not on the paper you hand them.
Email opens with the vendor’s address when the whole order is for one vendor, and empty on an in-house run. You can type or add addresses either way.
Print needs a computer — it goes through JS Print Manager, which is a desktop service. On a phone or an iPad use Share or Download PDF instead, and print or send from there.
Receiving, in two steps
Goods usually arrive before anyone has time to price and tag them, so receiving is two separate moments.
1. Record the receipt
When the shipment arrives, click Receive Shipment on a line, confirm the quantity, and add a note (which box it came in, who checked it). Partial shipments are normal: record what came, and the line stays open for the rest.
This creates no stock yet. What it does do is pin the cost: a design’s cost is calculated from the current metal price, so it’s captured the day the goods arrive. Tagging them a week later can’t change what you paid.
2. Add to inventory
Each receipt then shows how many pieces are waiting, with the pinned cost. Click Add to inventory and each piece becomes a stock record built from the design that was ordered — its metal, finish, center stone, size, stones and images — priced from your store’s multipliers off that pinned cost.
You can add fewer than arrived. If one piece is damaged and going back to the vendor, add the good ones and leave the rest; the receipt keeps showing what’s outstanding.
Straight after, Print tags takes you to the tag printer with exactly those new pieces queued up.
If you don’t receive here at all
Receiving and tagging are optional. Plenty of shops raise an order purely to track what’s on the way, then handle the goods by hand — and an order used that way is complete and correct, not unfinished.
So a line that has never been received reads — rather than “0 of 6”. A count only appears once something has actually arrived. Nothing nags you, and there’s no tagging queue to clear.
If you do want the order closed off, set its status to Complete. That’s independent of receiving.
Reading the columns
Received is what physically arrived. In stock is how much of it has been tagged. They’re different numbers on purpose — that gap is your tagging queue. Both show — until there’s something real to count.
The order’s status tracks receiving, not tagging: an order goes Complete once the vendor has sent everything, even if pieces are still waiting to be tagged. You can always add those to inventory afterwards.
A line can’t be deleted once anything has been received against it, and neither can the order — cancel it instead (set Status to Cancelled). Once anything has been received, clicking the order’s Delete explains that, with a shortcut to the Status field, and offers only Close.
Tips
- Build out your styles first. A few minutes per design turns every future reorder into a scan.
- Selling prices come from your store’s inventory multipliers (Settings → Stores). If those aren’t set, received pieces arrive with a cost but no prices.
- The Vendor Purchases report shows total spend per vendor over a date range.