By Safock Procurement Research Team8 min read
A purchase requisition asks for permission to spend. A purchase order commits that spend with a supplier. They are two steps in the same process, raised by different people for different readers, and mixing them up is behind many of the price and approval problems finance teams find later.
A purchase requisition is an internal form an employee raises to ask for something to be bought. It goes to the people who approve spending, never to a supplier, and it commits the organisation to nothing until it is approved and turned into an order.
Anyone with a need can usually raise one: a lab technician who needs glassware, a head chef short of produce, a site foreman who needs rebar. The requisition records the need clearly enough for an approver to say yes or no and for a buyer to act on it without going back to ask.
A purchase order (PO) is the document a buyer sends to a supplier to place an order. It states exactly what is being bought, at what price, delivered where and when, and on what terms. It is raised by procurement or an authorised buyer, usually after a requisition has been approved.
The PO is the record the rest of the process depends on. The store receives goods against it, and accounts payable later checks the invoice against it. A vague PO makes both of those checks harder.
A purchase requisition is an internal request that asks whether something may be bought, and a purchase order is an external instruction that tells a supplier to supply it. The other differences follow from who each document is written for.
A purchase order generally becomes binding once the supplier accepts it, whether by sending an acknowledgement or by delivering the goods. A purchase requisition is not binding, because it never leaves the organisation.
The exact point at which a contract forms depends on your jurisdiction, the PO's terms and any master agreement already in place with the supplier, so legal advice applies to specific cases. For day-to-day practice, the useful rule is simple: treat a sent PO as a commitment. Cancelling or changing one after the supplier has started work can carry costs, which is why the approval belongs before the PO is sent.
A requisition becomes a purchase order after it is approved and a supplier and price are confirmed. The buyer then copies the approved lines onto a PO and sends it. In a well-run process that copying is automatic, so nothing is re-typed between the two documents.
Yes, one requisition can be split across several purchase orders, and several requisitions can be combined into one. The link runs between lines rather than whole documents.
A requisition for lab supplies might include glassware from one supplier and reagents from another, so it becomes two POs. In the other direction, a central store might pool requests from many sites into one bulk PO to get a better price, then send the goods on to each site. Whichever way it goes, each PO line should still point back to the requisition line that approved it, so an auditor can trace any order back to the person who asked for it.
The flow is the same in any sector, even though the words change. Here are three generic examples.
The most common mistake is raising the purchase order after the goods or the invoice have already arrived. A retrospective PO records spending that has already happened, so the approval it carries changes nothing.
Procurement software keeps the requisition and the purchase order as linked records, so approved lines and prices carry forward without re-typing. In Bollard, for example, staff pick items from the item master, the system estimates the total from item-master costs, and the approval route is shown before the request is submitted. Buyers can send RFQs, compare quotations side by side and raise the PO from the winning quote. The PO carries the agreed price, terms and delivery site, and its PDF goes straight to the supplier.
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A purchase requisition is created by the person or team that needs the goods or service, such as a department head, site manager, technician or chef. In most organisations any employee can raise one. Approval then belongs to the people accountable for the budget, and a buyer in procurement turns the approved request into a purchase order for the supplier.
Approval usually happens at the requisition stage, following the organisation's approval matrix, which sets who can approve which amounts. The purchase order is then issued by an authorised buyer. Some organisations add a second approval on the PO itself when the final price is higher than the estimate, or when the order is above a set value or for a sensitive category.
Yes. A purchase order can be raised without a requisition, and some policies allow it for repeat orders under a standing contract or for buyers restocking a central store. The risk is that the spending skips internal approval. Most policies require an approved requisition above a set value, so that the person accountable for the budget agrees before money is committed.
In most organisations, purchase request and purchase requisition mean the same thing: an internal document asking for approval to buy. Some systems call it a purchase request, others a requisition, a requisition order or a sector-specific name such as a kitchen order or site material requisition. What matters is its role: internal, approval-seeking, and placed before the purchase order.
The requisition comes first. An employee raises it to ask for approval, approvers review it against budget and policy, and only then does a buyer raise the purchase order and send it to the supplier. Reversing the order, by raising a PO after the goods arrive, removes the point of approving the purchase at all.
It should. The PO number on the invoice is how accounts payable finds the order and receipt to match it against. Many organisations tell suppliers that invoices without a valid PO number will be returned unpaid. That policy, often called no PO, no pay, pushes suppliers and staff to place orders through the proper process.