Free and low-cost purchase order tools are worth considering and it helps to know, in advance, which capability they most often omit. It is rarely the ordering, which is straightforward and looks good in a comparison. It is the tracking of what actually arrived against each line, which is unglamorous and is the reason to have a system at all.
What free tools generally do well
Creating a professional order document with your details and terms, numbering it, emailing it to a supplier, and keeping a list of orders raised. For an organisation raising a handful of orders a month with deliveries that arrive complete, that is genuinely sufficient and there is no reason to pay for more.
What they generally omit
Ordered, received and invoiced quantities held per line, and revisions kept with their dates. Without those, partial deliveries cannot be tracked, the accrual has to be rebuilt by hand, and invoices cannot be matched properly. Test it in five minutes: order ten, receive four, invoice four, and see whether six show outstanding.
The other thing to check
Export. Free tools are the ones most likely to make data extraction awkward, and small organisations change systems more often than large ones because they outgrow them. Ask what the export contains before you build a year of history inside something you cannot leave.
Questions people ask about purchase order management software free
Is free ever the right answer?
Often, at low volume with complete deliveries. The mistake is assuming free means the same capability rather than a narrower one.
What about a spreadsheet instead?
Perfectly workable if numbering is controlled by one person. It fails when several people raise orders simultaneously.
When should we pay?
When somebody starts a second spreadsheet to track what is outstanding, which is the system trying to exist.