
“Reduce complexity through standardization.” -Michael L. George
Introduction
Purchase Order management is one of the fundamental aspects of any business where a single or multiple suppliers are involved in providing materials to run your business. Managing the PO effectively and releasing the funds to the suppliers play a vital role in making your business grow as well.
Although there are so many ways to manage your POs either in a notebook by handwritten notes, excel sheets where you can manage or a high cost PO Software which has wide varieties of features and reports which you never use.
Fundamental requirements of a Business For PO Management
The problem of validating the Purchase Orders from multiple suppliers for making a product will be a daunting task. That includes the right supply of materials, quantity, quality, credit limits, payment terms, etc. Not each supplier has the same template or model for you to work with.

Imagine the above mentioned activity is handled in the excel sheets/hand-written notes. It will be a total disarray, and the relationship with the suppliers will also get affected. As we saw before, there are wide varieties of high-cost software available in the market with high prices. However, specific requirements of your business related modification or customization need a lot of efforts and investment.
How to have a PO ERP System to match your needs?
In order to have a PO ERP System to match your specific needs of tracking, approving, invoicing, and reporting, a custom application alone will be the solution. Simultaneously, you may want to integrate that application with your Books, Inventory, Approval cycle, Warehouse, etc., as well.
Investing the money on building the software by going through a traditional way of purchasing separate UI/UX Software, Servers, database, storage, development resources and maintenance will shoot up your budget if you are a small/medium size enterprise. To reduce the development cycle and also get the best quality software that can be scalable, secured, and extendable for any integrations, you have to go with Low Code Platform software. By choosing this, you will be able to get the software developed in real quick time and ready for use in cycles/phases.
How Zoho Suite Helps here for this?
Zoho Creator, a low code platform software, helps in rapid development of the ERP. In addition, the application developed in the platform is web/mobile/tab friendly and also allow you to white label or brand based on your corporate standard. By adopting the platform, you can plan to develop applications in multiple phases or cycles. Given, the application is ready to use right away by the development team, as a decision maker/business owner, you should have a hands-on experience before you proceed with go live.
Coming back to the ERP discussed for PO Management, the stakeholders involved here are:
Suppliers
Front desk operators
Internal Approvers
Finance Team
All these stakeholders have to operate in the same application, but with a specific set of roles and responsibilities. This can easily be achieved by using the customer portal feature of Zoho Creator. Using this, specific departments deal with their own approvals and rejections quite easily.
Abundant Integration features:
As we also mentioned about integration, the Zoho Creator app will allow your ERP to be integrated with your legacy systems or with other finance applications if you already use them. Confined to the Zoho suite for this use case, below are possible integrations you can think of:
Zoho Email Notifications (for email alerts)
Zoho Books Integration (for accounts/book keeping/invoicing)
Zoho Inventory (to update your stocks)
Zoho Sign (for digital Sign of the documents)
Zoho Analytics Based Dashboard
Zoho CRM for supplier/lead management as well
Conclusion
Given, Purchase Order Management requires a clear planning and fund management for the organization as well as their production/services, it is critical to have a system in place for the Business Owners to handle them effectively. Zoho Suite of products will help in solving these problems quite easily.
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