A Purchase Order Template is a commercial document issued by a buyer to a seller, indicating types, quantities, and agreed prices for products or services the seller will provide to the buyer.
Sending a Purchase Order Template to a supplier constitutes an offer to buy products or services. Acceptance of a Purchase Order Template by a seller usually forms a contract between the buyer and seller.
To get a Purchase Order Template you could:
- Download from the internet either free or paid
- Use Office software websites (see the ones listed here)
- Create your own in Microsoft Word or Excel, OpenOffice or Google Docs
- Use a standalone program – either paid or free
- Buy a pre-printed book from a retailer
The Office Templates website from Microsoft Office has large range of templates available, including purchase orders, and is a good place to start looking.
Download a Purchase Order Template from the Internet
If you search for Purchase Order Templates via the search engines you will see a lot of web sites offering them. Some are good, but the ones highlighted on this site are better. Free Purchase Order Templates are available if you know where to look. There are also many special offers available on websites so it’s worth checking around.
Buy online at an office web site
There are many sites available that will provide a Purchase Order Template either free or for a small cost. Free ones tend to be limited but there are good suppliers that charge a small amount. Check that any template has all the required fields and is suitable for your particular business.
Create in Word / Open Office
If you know what information needs to be included on a Purchase Order Template then you can use a standard office program such as Word, Excel or Open Office to produce them yourself. They won’t look as good as the purchased templates but they will do the job.
Use a standalone program
You can purchase programs that will calculate all the necessary item charges and vat etc.
We hope you find the best template for you and your business.
What’s on a Purchase Order Template
Purchase Order Templates can be very simple or contain a lot of information depending on the type of product or service and the business.
Some items that could be included on a Purchase Order Template are:
- Business name
- Customer name
- Customer reference
- Receipt date
- Item prices
- Discounts
- Vat rate
- Vat amount
- Total
- Contact details
Excel Purchase Order
Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet software, followed by OpenOffice Calc and Google Sheets Online Docs. Excel is great for creating a purchase order from scratch, or by using a template, either from the free template gallery offered by Microsoft, or from an independent source which can be free or paid for.
Microsoft Office and Excel have numerous templates online at the Office templates & themes website. A search for "purchase order" doesn't give any results.
There are however many templates available for invoices and receipts, which have a lot of items in common with purchase orders.
Below is an example of an invoice template that can be downloaded from the Office templates website:
This template can be used as the base for creating a purchase order template with just a few edits.
Download the invoice template from the website and save it with a suitable file name in a folder on your hard disk or network drive, where you will be able to easily locate it.
Edit the template to change references to Invoice number to Purchase Order Number. Instead of Bill To change it to just To or Supplier. It may be necessary to remove data validation and merge cells for the title to change it from Invoice to Purchase Order if you are using the example template referenced here.
Another method of getting a purchase order template for Excel is to go to the OpenOffice Templates website and download one of the many purchase order templates available. Use OpenOffice Calc to save the template as an Excel document, and then simply edit in Excel as usual. There may be some compatibility issues that will need to be checked, but it a good method of getting a purchase order template for Excel.
OpenOffice Purchase Order
OpenOffice, from Apache, is a free Office suite of software that is widely used and has a spreadsheet program called Calc, similar to Excel and and Google Sheets. OpenOffice Calc can be used to create a purchase order from scratch, or from a template. Purchase Order Templates for OpenOffice are available free from it's own Templates gallery, or they can be found from other, independent sources, either as free downloads or paid downloads.
The main free templates website for OpenOffice is at templates.openoffice.org and by doing a search for "purchase order" a number of specific templates will appear in the search results, as can be seen in the screen shot below. There are some 78 purchase order templates available at the time of review.
Simply download the purchase order template required to a suitable location on your hard disk or network drive, rename it and then use it to create new documents, or edit it further to fit in with the company house style.
Excel doesn't appear to have any dedicated purchase order templates at the current time, and thus it would be possible to use one of the OpenOffice templates. Save the template as usual and open it in OpenOffice Calc. Then save as in Excel format and then Open in Excel. There may be some warnings and items to change due to compatibility issues, but it will work.
Google Docs Purchase Order
Google Docs is an online, cloud based Office software suite offered by Google free of charge. Within the Google Docs suite is a spreadsheet program called Sheets, which has most of the functionality of Microsoft Office Excel, though not for the most advanced users. It is ideal for creating a purchase order, either from a blank sheet, or by using a template, though templates are a little limited in Google Docs.
There are some free templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery, but not as many as the other office software programs such as Excel and OpenOffice Calc. There are few options for other sources of templates for Google Sheets as it does not allow the user to store their own templates within the program, but there is a simple work around described below.