Purchase Order Workflow: Reorder to Receiving

Most of what's written about purchase ordering covers one step at a time: how to calculate a reorder point, how to build a PO, how to track one once it's sent. Useful individually, but a merchant living through the process experiences it as one continuous sequence, not four separate articles. This is that sequence, start to finish, with each step linking out to the post that covers it properly rather than repeating any of them here.

The full sequence

Four steps, in order: a reorder point gets crossed, you size the order, you create and send the purchase order, and you track it through to receiving. Using the site's running example, a candle, "Cedar & Fig, 250g," selling 5 units a day with a 12-day supplier lead time and a 30-unit safety buffer, here's what each step actually looks like.

Step 1 — the reorder point gets crossed

Cedar & Fig's reorder point is 90 units: (5 units/day × 12-day lead time) + 30 units safety stock = 90. When stock on hand drops to 90, that's the signal to order: not a low-stock guess, a calculated trigger built from actual sales velocity and the real time it takes a new order to arrive.

The formula, the reasoning behind the safety-stock number, and the mistakes that quietly break it are covered in full in how to calculate reorder points. This post assumes you already have that number and picks up from the moment it's crossed.

Step 2 — sizing the order

Crossing the reorder point tells you it's time to order. It doesn't tell you how much. That's a separate number, the reorder quantity, usually your target stock level minus what's currently on hand or already on order, rounded up to whatever case pack or minimum order quantity your supplier requires. The reorder quantity guide covers the formula and the MOQ rounding in detail; the number that comes out of it is what goes on the purchase order in the next step.

Step 3 — creating and sending the PO

With a supplier and a quantity decided, the purchase order itself is a Draft in Shopify's admin (supplier, destination location, line items, cost and terms) that you review and mark Ordered when it's ready. From there you export it as a PDF and send it to your supplier; Shopify doesn't email it for you natively. The full purchase orders guide walks through every field and every screen; this step is the middle of the sequence, not the whole story.

Step 4 — tracking and receiving

Once a PO is Ordered, Shopify's own tracking on the object stops there. The rest happens on a linked inventory transfer you create for it, which carries the actual shipment through to receiving. Until that transfer exists and is in transit, nothing shows as Incoming; once stock is actually received, it moves into Available. How to track purchase orders covers the full status model, and managing a partial receipt covers what happens when the shipment that lands doesn't match the order in full.

Where it breaks down

The sequence above sounds clean written out. In practice it breaks in a handful of predictable places:

• The reorder point goes stale. It was calculated once from an old sales average and never recalculated, so it fires too late or too early relative to how the product actually sells now.
• The PO gets drafted and forgotten. Someone builds it, gets pulled onto something else, and it sits in Draft for a week before anyone notices it was never sent.
• Receiving lags behind the actual delivery. Stock is physically on the shelf, but nobody's recorded the receipt on the linked transfer yet, so Shopify still shows it as short, and whatever's watching the reorder point sees a gap that isn't really there.

All three are the same underlying failure: a step that depends on a person remembering to do something, at a moment they're busy doing something else. StockCue's buying planner takes the remembering out of it: it recalculates the reorder point from live sales data, groups what's due by supplier, and keeps the PO moving from draft to sent to received inside one screen.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the purchase order workflow from start to finish?

A reorder point gets crossed, you calculate how much to order, you create and send the purchase order to your supplier, and you track it through to receiving, where the received stock finally becomes available to sell.

Where does a reorder recommendation turn into an actual purchase order?

Once you know both the trigger, that the reorder point was crossed, and the quantity, the reorder quantity rounded to any minimum order requirement, those two numbers are what go onto the purchase order you create and send.

What's the most common point where this workflow breaks down for small stores?

Two spots, most often: a reorder point that was calculated once and never updated as sales velocity changed, and receiving that lags behind the actual delivery because nobody recorded it on the linked transfer, so the system still shows a shortage that's already been resolved on the shelf.