How Do I Import a Purchase Order into an Invoice?

Electronic Service Control makes building and managing purchase orders fast and easy. It also makes building and managing customer invoices fast and easy. So imagine how much better life would be if you could build a purchase order and then simply import the items over into your invoices. The good news is that you can!

Any purchase order, both opened and closed, can be imported into a sales invoice. You can also choose to import only specific parts or all items to the invoice.
All you'll need to get started is a purchase order.

You'll start by opening an existing invoice or creating a new one.  In the Sales Invoicing screen, you'll head into the Activities menu, select Import Purchase Order.

You'll now be greeted by the Search for Purchase Order screen, this will help you to locate any purchase order in your system. Simply enter the criteria by which you wish to search and then click the Search button. A list of purchase orders that match the criteria will be produced on the bottom half of the screen. Select the purchase order you wish to import and then click OK.

You will now be presented with the Import Purchase Order screen. Each item, along with its Description and Quantity will be listed in this screen. While the Extended Cost column is displayed, it may not necessarily be the amount that is carried into the invoice. This is because inventory costs on an invoice come from the total valuation of the item itself, not a single purchase order.

Items added to the purchase order as Accounts cannot be directly imported into an invoice. Under the Miscellaneous Material section at the bottom of this screen, you'll select a billing code to be used for those line items. Multiple Account line items can be grouped together by checking the Import as a single item option.

If a user adds a line item to a purchase order as an Account and then wants to import that item’s cost to an invoice, the only way that the imported item will carry over the cost to the invoice is if the material billing code being used has the same account for both the Cost Debit and Cost Credit accounts. This wash of accounts is required to prevent double costing of the account when billing this out. If the cost accounts are different on the billing code, when the import is attempted, the cost value will be zero. To edit the Cost Debit and Cost Credit accounts of a billing code, you may edit the billing code by going to the Enter Billing Codes screen under the Sales menu.

In the Import Purchase Order screen, you will have the option of importing all items from the purchase order to the invoice, or selecting individual ones by checking and unchecking the boxes to the left of each item. Once you have selected the items to be imported, click the Import button at the bottom of the screen. The line items will now appear on the Sales Invoicing screen with their associated costs and prices.

This particular function is used for importing items into an invoice from a single purchase order created in ESC. However, you will also have the option of importing a multitude of items from various purchase orders using the Import Items Received to a Job/Dispatch option in the Activities menu of the Sales Invoicing screen.