Editing, cancelling and amendments

How you change a purchase order depends on where it is in its life. A draft can be edited freely; once it’s approved or has goods against it, changes go through a controlled amendment.

Editing a draft

While a PO is Draft or Rejected, you can edit its quantities, delivery dates, pricing and lines.

• Editing recomputes line GST and the PO totals.
• Every edit is audit-logged (who, when, what changed).
• If someone else has changed the PO since you opened it, your save is rejected with a prompt to refresh, so concurrent edits can’t quietly overwrite each other.

Editing needs the same permission as creating a PO.

Caution

An approved PO, or one with any goods receipt, cannot be edited directly. Use the amendment flow below.

Cancelling a PO

Cancel a PO that’s no longer required:

1. Choose Cancel (you need the cancel permission).
2. Enter a reason: a structured category plus free text.
3. Confirm.

The PO moves to Cancelled, becomes read-only, and stops accepting goods receipts. It drops off active dashboards but stays visible in history, it isn’t deleted. Where configured, the vendor is notified. The cancellation is audit-logged with the actor, reason and timestamp.

Note

A PO with goods already received cannot be cancelled, return the goods first (see Returns and debit notes).

The PO status model

A PO moves through a defined set of states, and only valid transitions are allowed:

Draft → Pending Approval → Approved → Partially Received → Fully Received

plus Rejected and Cancelled. For example, a rejected PO can go back to Draft when you edit it, and an approved or pending PO can be cancelled. An illegal jump (say, straight from Draft to Fully Received) is refused. Every transition writes an audit entry recording where it came from, where it went, who did it and when.

Amendments

When a PO is already approved (or has goods against it), you change it through a controlled amendment:

1. Start an amendment, this creates a new version and keeps the prior version read-only.
2. Change what’s needed, quantity, price, delivery date, terms, or adding/removing lines (per your policy), and capture a reason.
3. The amendment routes back through the approval chain (full or delta-only, depending on configuration), and a diff is shown so approvers see exactly what changed.

Lines already received cannot be reduced below the received quantity, and a cancelled or closed PO can’t be amended. The audit captures the actor, reason, before/after values, the approval chain and timestamps.

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Add a screenshot here: the amendment diff view marking what changed (quantity/price/dates) between the prior version and the amended version, before it routes for re-approval.