Purchase Orders

[bcantlay]

The clunky Filmaker database that our company has been using to "track"
projects had a table and form in place to handle purchase orders - what is
the best way to incorporate this into project?

For example a job may involve sending work out to a printer and a mailhouse
for so many brochures to be sent out. To me that is a project (say a
conference) with multiple of what our company calls jobs but likely work out
as sub-projects or multiple summary tasks in that project. In this case
there would be a number of tasks involved (simplified)- get quotes from
vendors, sign off on vendors, send design to printer with purchase order,
send brochures to mailhouse with purchase order, mail brochures, input tasks
and provide report to accounting.

I would think that the initial job request would go into the summary task
notes or I could use a number of custom fields for vendors, estimates, print
quantity, things of that nature - although I would hate to have that
cluttering up the task info since these would only be for these specific
printing jobs. Do I then create a form or run a report or something along
those lines to get the purchase order created that would pull this
information? Since I would need this functionality in multiple projects
would I then need to add it to a template? Is this better left outside of
project or done in another office app and somehow tied or linked from the
project workspace, perhaps?

I probably did not explain this very well, but would appreciate any thoughts
you might have. I very well might be missing the obvious but project is
relatively new to me and a bit overwhelming.

Thanks.

Bob

 

[Ben Howard]

okay, leave project and project server to do things like resource management
and scheduling, and if you can, put PO requirements into another system.
Remember Project Server is not a Purchase Order/Cost Management/Cost
Accounting system.