Close or reopen an order

Closing an order says "stop waiting for this".

Some orders never finish. A supplier discontinues a line, a shipment is cancelled, half arrives and the balance is written off. Without a way to end them, those orders sit in the awaiting-delivery pile forever and quietly ruin every number built on it.

Closing is the ending. It is administrative: no stock moves, nothing is destroyed, and it can be undone.

This page covers:

• Close, delete, or neither
• Close one order
• What closing changes and what it does not
• Close a backlog in one pass
• Reopen a closed order

Close, delete, or neither

Three endings exist, and picking the wrong one loses information.

The rule of thumb: if a supplier ever saw it, close rather than delete. The app enforces this — a draft cannot be closed, and an authorised order cannot be deleted.

Close one order

1. Open the order from Purchase orders.
2. Click Close PO.
3. Type a reason. It is optional and you should write one anyway — in six months it is the only thing that explains the gap between what you ordered and what you got.
4. Confirm.

If the order is partially received, the dialog says so. Closing writes off whatever has not arrived. Stock already booked in stays exactly as it is, at the cost it was booked at.

Closing needs the approval permission — the same one that authorises orders, not the one that creates them. If the button is missing, send the order number and the reason to whoever approves purchase orders.

If it refuses to close

One thing blocks a close: material you sent out to the supplier has not come back. Those units are sitting at the supplier and still belong to you, so ending the order would strand them outside your records. Record the return first, then close.

What closing changes and what it does not

Closing is bookkeeping, and it is worth being precise about the boundary.

What changes:

• The status becomes Closed, with the reason, the timestamp and who did it.
• The order drops out of Awaiting receipt.
• It stops being offered when someone books a delivery, so nobody can receive against it by accident.
• It moves to the Closed tab in the list, where it stays findable.

What does not change:

• No entry is written to the stock ledger. Closing is not a movement.
• Goods already received stay received, at the location they were received into.
• Costs already recorded stay recorded.
• Nothing is deleted. Every line, price and delivery against it is still there.

That last point is why closing is safe to do in bulk while deleting is not.

Close a backlog in one pass

A backlog is the normal case — orders accumulate one at a time and get tidied all at once.

1. On Purchase orders, tick the orders you want to end.
2. Click Close.
3. Give one reason, which is applied to all of them.
4. Confirm.

You get a per-order result. Anything that could not be closed is listed with its own reason — already received, still a draft, or material still out at the supplier — so nothing fails silently and you know exactly what is left.

Reopen a closed order

Only a closed order can be reopened, and the reopened order lands where it would have been had it never closed.

1. Open the order.
2. Click Reopen PO.

Where it lands depends on its history. If stock was already received against it, it returns to Partial — some arrived, some is still owed. If nothing ever arrived, it returns to Authorised. Either way it becomes receivable again and rejoins Awaiting receipt.

Reopening clears the close reason and the closing audit trail, because the order is no longer closed and a stale reason would be misleading. If the same order is later closed again, write the reason again.

Explore

Raising the order in the first place. Where the statuses come from, and why a draft cannot be received against. Learn more →

Recording a delivery. Closing removes an order from this flow, so it is worth knowing what the flow does. Learn more →