They travel in opposite directions and they are written at opposite ends of the job. A purchase order is issued by the buyer to the seller, before anything is delivered, and it says: send me these things, at these prices, to this address, by this date. An invoice is issued by the seller to the buyer, after the work or the goods, and it says: pay me this amount by this date. That is why this page has no bank details on it anywhere — it is not asking to be paid, it is committing to buy. If you are the one who wants to be paid, you want the invoice maker instead.

A quotation is the seller’s offer: they name a price for work or goods they are willing to supply, and they set the terms. A purchase order is the buyer’s response, and it is a document in its own right rather than a signed copy of theirs — you restate what you are ordering, at what price, and you attach your own terms about delivery, invoicing and what happens if what arrives is not what you asked for. That is why the order carries a “Against your quotation” field: it links the two so that a price dispute has a paper trail, while leaving no doubt that the conditions on this sheet are yours. When you are on the other side of that exchange, the quotation maker is the page you want.

Because that number is the only thing tying three separate documents together. Accounts payable takes the purchase order, the delivery note and the invoice, and checks that the quantities and prices on all three agree before releasing payment — the routine known as a three-way match. An invoice that arrives with no order number cannot be matched to anything, so it sits in a queue until somebody works out which order it belongs to, or it is returned unpaid. That is why the number is printed in a box at the top of this order rather than tucked into a list of details, and why the first standard condition asks the supplier to quote it on everything they send.

It states the date you need the goods, and it is the single line that changes what the supplier does today rather than next week. What it does not do on its own is create a penalty for missing it — that depends entirely on what you and the supplier have agreed. If a late delivery genuinely costs you something, say so in the conditions in plain words, and get their acknowledgement in writing before they dispatch. A date printed on a form with nothing behind it is a date that gets treated as a preference.

This page cannot answer that for you, and any page that answers it confidently is overreaching. What can be said plainly: a purchase order is an offer to buy on stated terms, and in ordinary commercial practice it starts to bind once the supplier accepts it — by acknowledging it, or by shipping against it. Whether that is true in your situation, what it commits each side to, and what happens when the two sets of terms conflict are questions about your agreement and your jurisdiction. If the relationship is worth more than a single delivery, put a proper agreement behind it: the contract generator is for the document that survives a dispute, which a purchase order was never written to do.

The buyer. It is your authorisation of the spend, which is why this page prints one signature block and not two, and why it sits next to a separate “requested by” line — in most businesses the person who wants the goods and the person allowed to approve the money are not the same person, and the supplier benefits from seeing both. The supplier does not sign this sheet. If they confirm the order, they send their own acknowledgement, which is a separate document and belongs in your file next to this one. A second signature line for them would promise a signature that never arrives on this piece of paper.

Keep the number and mark it as a revision. Both sides have already filed the original under that number, and issuing a fresh number for the same goods is the reliable way to end up with two deliveries and two invoices. Set the revision field, reprint, and send it with a line saying what changed — quantities, dates, or a cancelled line. If the change is large enough that it is really a different order, cancel the first one in writing first, so there is no version of events in which it is still live.

A description alone works if it is specific enough that a stranger in the supplier’s warehouse would pick the same thing. Most of the time it is not: “kitchen display, 15 inch” could be three products in their catalogue at three prices. The supplier’s own part number removes every argument about which model was meant, so use it when you have it and write a fuller description when you do not. The unit matters for the same reason — ten boxes and ten items are different orders, and the difference is only visible when the unit is printed beside the number.

Nothing is uploaded, and the draft is saved on this device. The whole page is static files and the order is assembled by your own browser, so your supplier names, prices and delivery addresses have no server to be sent to. Your draft is kept in this browser’s local storage as you type, which matters more here than on most pages — a twenty-line order is an afternoon’s work and closing the tab should not cost it. “Start a blank order” deletes it, and so does clearing your browser data. Your logo and signature image are resized in the browser and kept the same way. The honest footnote: this site does serve Google ads, which are a third-party request like on any ad-supported page, but they never see what you type.

Because your browser already makes better PDFs than a JavaScript library can. A PDF library is around 40 KB of code to download and draws text as shapes, so the result cannot be selected, searched or copied — and a supplier who cannot copy your order number out of the PDF will retype it, which is how a digit goes missing. Print, then choose “Save as PDF”, and you get a real A4 document with real text. The pages are built here rather than left to the browser to break, because Chrome’s print dialog has its own Margins setting that overrides page margins in CSS. For the same reason this document uses no background shading at all: Chrome’s “Background graphics” box is off by default and strips every CSS background, so a shaded table header that looks right on screen would print blank. Every bit of emphasis comes from borders and bold type, which are content and always print.