Purchase order
In accounting, purchase order means a commitment to buy.
- Layer
- Lexicon
- Defined in
- Lexicon
- Components
- 1
Not a rule
Bookkeeping convention — not codified. US GAAP governs recognition, measurement and presentation — not the mechanics a bookkeeper uses to get there. Anyone citing a standard for this word is citing the wrong thing.
Every citation in this system, with the text we read and the date we checked it, is in US GAAP and where these rules come from.
Purchase order, in use
Quoted from the document that use the word — what it does to an interface, in the spec's own sentence.
A purchase order is not an expense — accruing it silently is a cutoff error, and showing it nowhere is how a category with six figures of open POs looks under budget right up until the invoices land.
For founders
The same idea written for a founder: what it costs a startup that ignores it, and what to do in a real month.
- What to put on an invoice: a field-by-field guideThe fields a B2B invoice needs to get paid on time: legal names, a numbering sequence, dates, terms, tax lines, PO and remit-to, and how to fix one.
- Accounts payable process for startups: intake to paymentHow a bill moves from inbox to paid: intake, coding, approval, scheduling and recording, plus AP aging and who approves what at a 10-person startup.
- Accrued expenses vs accounts payable: the differenceAP is a bill you’ve received; an accrued expense is a cost incurred before the bill arrives. When to accrue, and how reversing entries work, by example.
What it is not called
Each of these is a real word for a different thing. Using it here is what makes a product read as though it was built by someone who has not done the work.
- order
Components that render this
The concept is not documentation-only. These are the components that name it in their specification, grouped and stated exactly as the catalog states them.
Also in Payables
Work with this concept
The calculators that compute it and the ledger payloads that carry it. A definition is where a reader starts; these are where they go next.
Defined in Lexicon. This page is generated from that document, so the two cannot disagree.