Blanket POs and Releases

Use blanket purchase orders and their associated releases to establish purchasing agreements with vendors to facilitate the purchase of repeatedly bought items.

Blanket purchase orders cannot be vouchered against or received. The blanket purchase order acts as both a template for setting up new releases quickly and a control device to limit (at your discretion) what is bought and how much is spent by whoever creates the release.

You must create release orders from blanket orders with the Create Blanket Purchase Order Releases function. You can select lines from the blanket for copying over to the new release. The release order has the same purchase order number as the blanket from which it was created. However, it is assigned a unique release number to differentiate it and other releases from the blanket order itself. Once you create a release, it can be maintained, printed, received, and vouchered just as a normal purchase order is.

Releases are treated as normal purchase orders for commitment purposes. All unreleased amounts on blanket order lines are calculated and reported separately. This amount can be included in or excluded from the commitment total, based on the Include Unreleased Blanket Amounts on Commitments flag in the Configure Purchasing Settings screen. For commitment calculation purposes, the unreleased blanket line amounts, not the total blanket amount set up in the blanket header, are used. (The blanket header amount does not have the additional charge information necessary for commitment calculation.)