Emailing a purchase order to a supplier
Essential can email a purchase order straight to your supplier as a PDF, so you don't have to rebuild the order in another tool.
Before you start
The supplier needs an email address on file. Add it under Settings -> Inventory and Purchase Orders so it prefills here; you can also type or correct the address at send time.
Make sure the order is right first. Sending a draft locks its line items, quantities, and unit costs. The supplier can still be corrected later — click Edit on the Order Info card to open Edit Order Info.
Send the order
A draft order offers two ways to send it, at the top of the page:
Submit & Email sends in one click, using the supplier's saved email address and the default subject and message. It needs a saved supplier email and no unsaved changes on the order.
Review & Send opens the Send to Supplier dialog, where you can review or change the recipient, subject, and message (Essential fills in a default subject and message you can edit for this send), check the preview of the PDF the supplier will receive, then send. This is the only way to send when the supplier has no saved email address.
Either way, Essential generates the purchase order PDF, attaches it to the email, saves a copy of that PDF on the purchase order's files, and records the send on the order's timeline.
Sending a draft moves it to Submitted and stamps the date it was sent. From that point the order counts toward Incoming on the Inventory page and can be received against.
Resending
Once an order is Submitted, choose Resend to supplier from the "..." menu, any time before the order is paid or voided — useful if the supplier lost it or you're chasing a delivery. It opens the same dialog, titled Resend to Supplier once the order has been emailed before. Resending refreshes the sent date and adds another timeline entry, but it never changes the order's status, so resending a Fully Received order won't push it backwards. Once an order is Paid or Void the action is no longer offered: there's nothing left to chase.
Changing what the PDF looks like
The purchase order PDF is a template you control under Settings -> Inventory and Purchase Orders. It starts from Essential's built-in layout — your business name, logo and address, the supplier's contact details, the PO number and delivery date, the line items with quantities and costs, the total, and your notes. Edit it there if you want different wording or layout, and the settings page shows whether you're on the built-in version or your own customized one.
Each line's name and SKU on the PDF are the supplier-facing values: what you entered for this supplier on the order's lines, falling back to the item's Name shown to supplier / Code shown to supplier defaults from Settings -> Items Pricebook, then to the item's own name and code.
The email itself is sent from your business's verified sending address, the same one used for invoices and other customer email.
Where to find it: Open a purchase order under Inventory -> Purchase Orders. A draft order shows Submit & Email and Review & Send; a submitted order's "..." menu shows Resend to supplier. The PDF template lives in Settings -> Inventory and Purchase Orders.
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