The major feature of this release is purchase order approval and statuses. We have also fixed a number of issues and improved performance.

Listed below are the features and fixes we have added.

Purchase order changes

We've made changes to the Purchase Order Detail screen. The following fields are all editable:

New feature:

Purchase order approval

This feature adds integrity and a more structured workflow to the procurement and purchasing process.

Statuses are added to purchase orders which can require approval by a user with the approver ability. The assignment of purchases to a project can also be required.

This feature is available to those on a Jet plan or above.

Purchase order approval needs to be switched on for your account. Contact us to request this.

Next, in Company Settings under Sales you can switch on two parts of this feature. The first requires approval of purchase orders. The second requires that all purchases be assigned to a project (as opposed to just assigning them to stock).

If you don't require purchase approval you can still uses the statuses, but there will be no approval status (only draft, sent and rejected).

A user can be given the role of Purchaser then the further option of being able to approve purchase orders.

Purchasers without the “approve” option will only be able to save to draft and can edit these purchase orders while in the Draft Status.

With the “approve” option, the user could also save directly to Approved or Sent.

While viewing a purchase order’s details, an approver can also change the status as below:

When a purchase order is in the Approved state, it is no longer editable. It is however possible for an approver to revert it to draft should it need editing.

New fields are visible in the purchase order details screen, including the private note, the public note and a new editable “Link” field providing easy access to shared documents related to the PO.

In the Approved state, the purchase order PDF can be downloaded or directly emailed to the supplier. Note, the status is NOT automatically changed to Sent when a the PDF is downloaded or emailed. This is by design but we are open to feedback on this.

Once in the Sent status, it can no longer be reverted to Draft. The only other option would be Rejected. The Sent status enables other operations such as being able to export to Xero manually, receive the purchase order and record invoice information.

A basic audit history for the purchase order is available at the bottom of the purchase order details screen:

The various states are visible in the purchase order history list and the list can be filtered as desired:

The user can also set their default criteria by clicking the Settings button on the purchase order history list:

API Changes

GET Activity now includes Department ID.

We have also updated a number of areas of the API to improve robustness.

Fixes

Performance

We have made a number of changes to improve the performance of Tidy.

Ampersands in task names

In some circumstances an ampersand in a task name would display incorrectly. This has been fixed.

Material entries

Material entries now default to the suggested supplier from the material plan.

Time writer chart

Days which were sometimes out of order on the chart are now always in order.

Contact emails

If an email address is added for a customer or supplier, it must be a valid email address.

Xero integration

We have improved the Xero integration by removing issues which would occasionally cause the integration to fail.