Should the purchase order go to the client?

Usually not. A PO carries your net price, which is the one number a cost-plus agreement discloses deliberately and a retail-method agreement does not disclose at all. The client gets the proposal and the invoice; the vendor gets the PO.

What is the difference between a purchase order and an order acknowledgement?

The PO is what you send; the acknowledgement is what the vendor sends back confirming what they have entered. When the two disagree, the acknowledgement is what the factory will build — which is why it has to be checked line by line rather than filed.

DefinitionUpdated July 31, 20262 min read

Purchase order: what a designer's PO has to say

A purchase order is the instruction that buys the goods. The fields it must carry — sidemark, finish codes, freight terms, deposit — and why the vendor's acknowledgement is the document that actually binds.

By Idan Mann, founder of NYA

The short answer

A purchase order is the numbered instruction a designer sends a vendor to buy specified goods. It carries the item, finish codes, quantity, agreed net price, ship-to address, sidemark, freight terms and deposit. The vendor's acknowledgement — not the PO — is what confirms the order as the factory understood it.

A purchase order exists so that a disagreement six months from now can be settled by reading rather than remembering. It is also the document that turns an approved proposal into a commitment, which is why it should never be raised for anything the client has not approved in writing.

The fields that matter

PO number, unique and sequential — this is the spine of the whole audit trail.
Vendor and your account number, so the discount applied is the one you negotiated.
Item, model number and every finish code, copied from the spec sheet rather than retyped from memory.
Quantity and agreed net price per line, plus expected freight.
Ship-to — normally your receiving warehouse, not the job site — and the [sidemark](/glossary/sidemark).
Freight terms, which decide who owns the goods while they are on a truck and who files the claim when they arrive damaged.
Deposit paid and balance terms, and the expected [lead time](/glossary/lead-time).

Read the acknowledgement. It is the vendor telling you what they think you ordered, and it is the last free opportunity to catch a transposed finish code. Once a custom piece is in production, a discrepancy stops being a correction and becomes a negotiation.

Why POs get raised late, and why that hurts

The gap between client approval and the purchase order going out is dead time that nobody is tracking, and it comes straight out of the install date — the lead time clock does not start until the vendor has the order and the deposit. On a project with forty line items, a week of administrative drift is a week of delay the client will attribute to the factory.

Common questions

Should the purchase order go to the client?: Usually not. A PO carries your net price, which is the one number a cost-plus agreement discloses deliberately and a retail-method agreement does not disclose at all. The client gets the proposal and the invoice; the vendor gets the PO.
What is the difference between a purchase order and an order acknowledgement?: The PO is what you send; the acknowledgement is what the vendor sends back confirming what they have entered. When the two disagree, the acknowledgement is what the factory will build — which is why it has to be checked line by line rather than filed.

Keep reading

Purchase order: what a designer's PO has to say

By Idan Mann, founder of NYA

The short answer

The fields that matter

PO number, unique and sequential — this is the spine of the whole audit trail.

Vendor and your account number, so the discount applied is the one you negotiated.

Item, model number and every finish code, copied from the spec sheet rather than retyped from memory.

Quantity and agreed net price per line, plus expected freight.

Ship-to — normally your receiving warehouse, not the job site — and the [sidemark](/glossary/sidemark).

Freight terms, which decide who owns the goods while they are on a truck and who files the claim when they arrive damaged.

Deposit paid and balance terms, and the expected [lead time](/glossary/lead-time).

Why POs get raised late, and why that hurts

Common questions

Should the purchase order go to the client?: Usually not. A PO carries your net price, which is the one number a cost-plus agreement discloses deliberately and a retail-method agreement does not disclose at all. The client gets the proposal and the invoice; the vendor gets the PO.
What is the difference between a purchase order and an order acknowledgement?: The PO is what you send; the acknowledgement is what the vendor sends back confirming what they have entered. When the two disagree, the acknowledgement is what the factory will build — which is why it has to be checked line by line rather than filed.