Free guide

How to write a purchase order

The fields a purchase order actually needs, the ones people skip and regret, and a plain-text template you can copy right now.

A purchase order only has one job: give the supplier everything they need to fulfill the order correctly, and give you a document you can hold both sides to if something goes wrong. Most of the fields below exist because someone, somewhere, got burned by leaving them out.

The fields that matter

1. PO number. A unique, sequential identifier. This is what you and the supplier both reference for the life of the order — every email, every reply, every invoice ties back to it. Skip this and you'll be matching orders by item description and date, which falls apart the moment you order the same thing twice.
2. Buyer and supplier details. Your company's name and address, and the supplier's, including a named contact on their side if you have one.
3. Ship-to address. Not always the same as your billing address. State it explicitly rather than assuming the supplier will guess correctly — a wrong assumption here is an expensive, slow mistake to unwind.
4. Line items. Item description, quantity, unit price, and line total, for each item. A vague description ("parts," "misc. hardware") is the single most common reason the wrong item ships and nobody catches it until it arrives.
5. Requested delivery date. A specific date, not "ASAP." This is the one field the entire follow-up process depends on later — without it, "late" has no meaning and you can't sort your open orders by anything but guesswork.
6. Payment terms. Net 30, net 60, on delivery — whatever you've agreed, put it on the document itself instead of relying on a separate contract everyone forgets to check when an invoice actually shows up.
7. Authorization. Who approved this order. Even a simple name field creates accountability internally, and gives the supplier someone to reference if a question comes up.

A plain-text template

Copy this, fill in the brackets, and adjust the layout to fit however you send POs today.

PURCHASE ORDER

PO Number: [PO-XXXX]
Date issued: [date]
Requested delivery date: [date]

Buyer: [your company, address]
Supplier: [supplier name, address, contact name]
Ship to: [address, if different from buyer]

Line items:
  1. [item description] — Qty: [n] — Unit price: [$] — Line total: [$]
  2. [item description] — Qty: [n] — Unit price: [$] — Line total: [$]

Order total: [$]
Payment terms: [e.g. Net 30]
Approved by: [name]

After you send it

Writing the order correctly is the easy half. The harder part is tracking it against the date you put on it — knowing which of your open orders are approaching that date, which have already passed it, and which never got a confirmed date back from the supplier at all. That's a separate problem from writing the PO, and it's the one most teams actually lose time to.

If you're setting this up in a spreadsheet, the Excel tracking guide and free template covers the column layout that keeps it maintainable. If you'd rather it happen automatically, SupplierPing sorts every order you import by exactly that requested delivery date and drafts the follow-up when one's due — there's a 14-day free trial, no card required.