Please - API to create Purchase Order

[EastRace]

Square's Purchase Order functionality can't integrate with our suppliers on the backend. So we can't use that as the tool to actually create orders of what we want to buy. 

However, we buy a lot of inventory and tracking / receiving is absolutely critical. 

The best way we have figured out to receive inventory correctly with cost (and as a bonus track freight/shipping costs) is to create a PO on the fly when we are receiving. Then scan everything and cross off the paper delivery invoice we got. Unfortunately we need to manually enter costs too, and typos happen or staff forget. This is really unfortunate because the workflow of receiving is *super valuable*. I just love the work Square has done here, but unfortunately it's just not quite enough.

If there was an API to create a PO such that it could be received in the Square App, we could automatically do that with our various 3rd parties we order from. And then we could trust the cost data is accurate. And see discrepancies of what is delivered, since the team would just be comparing what we ordered (on PO, set via API) with the delivery.

This could be pretty simple, just CreatePurchaseOrder and ListPurchaseOrders and maybe CancelPurchaseOrder. You wouldn't even need to implement editing, because that's pretty good in-app! 

The beauty of a platform would mean it has API abilities to fill in the gaps of 1st party products, but that's only possible when primitives are exposed. Square won't ever have specialized 1st party offerings, but the 3rd party marketplace could!

[Lou8 · Accepted solution]

Hi @EastRace, thanks for posting on the Community and sharing your request in details 🙂.

I can see how enhance functionalities on Square current's Purchase Order feature would greatly benefit retailers like yourselves who purchase a lot of inventory.

Have you had a look at our App Marketplace to see if any of our integrated APIs could fit the bill ? I did a quick research myself, and it looks like Thrive Inventory could work as they facilitate purchase orders and have different options of receiving inventory.

Let me know if this helps !

[EastRace]

Thanks, I don't think it works unless you go all in with Thrive Inventory. You need to basically track inventory on their system instead of Square's at that point. Square's is actually pretty good, it's just all blocked behind Square 1st party UX. 

Even editing a PO we created by importing an excel with 500 items in it becomes unresponsive in Safari. When I open a PO and click edit, it just hangs. So I really would love if we could implement this ourselves, square's inventory is slick! Just need a little tooling to get things into it via APIs. Thanks again,