Creating a purchase order is easy, and almost every product does it. Purchase order management software is judged on the part that comes afterwards, when the order is live in the world and reality starts diverging from it: deliveries arrive in pieces, prices change, quantities are adjusted, and somebody eventually needs to know what is still outstanding. That is the job, and it is where products differ.
Open, received and invoiced, as three different numbers
An order for a hundred units may have sixty received and forty invoiced, and those are three separate facts about the same line. Software that tracks only the order total cannot answer whether you are being invoiced for something that has not arrived, which is the check the whole three-way match exists to perform. Line level receipt and invoice quantities are the minimum useful shape.
Changes, kept as changes
Prices move, quantities are revised and delivery dates slip. A system that overwrites the order silently loses the thing you need later: what was agreed when. Keeping revisions with their dates costs nothing at the time and is the difference between a supplier disagreement that takes ten minutes and one that takes a week of searching through email.
What is still open, on one screen
The most valuable report a purchase order system produces is the list of orders that are open and ageing, because it is simultaneously a delivery-chasing list for purchasing and an accrual list for finance. Teams that cannot produce it end up rebuilding it by hand each month end, which is a good test of whether the system is doing its job.
Questions people ask about purchase order management software
Do we need purchase order software if we already have accounting software?
Many accounting packages create purchase orders. Fewer track partial receipts and revisions at line level, which is the part that matters for matching. Check that specifically rather than the presence of the feature name.
How does purchase order software relate to the three-way match?
It supplies two of the three documents: the order and, usually, the goods receipt. Without those recorded properly, the match cannot be performed on the invoice at all, which is why payables problems are so often purchasing problems.
What about purchases that never had an order?
They cannot be matched and have to be approved on their own merits by a person. The share of your spend in that category is worth measuring, because it sets a hard ceiling on how much of payables can ever run automatically.