Purchase orders from approved requests

A purchase order is a form filled in from information that already exists, somewhere else, in a slightly different shape. It is pure transcription, which makes it both a waste of a person's time and a reliable source of small errors.

Put the template where it can be read

Your actual PO template goes in Documents, along with your rules: what needs a PO at all, what thresholds require which approval, and what your standard terms are.

If those rules only exist as custom, write them down now. Everything below assumes they are legible.

Draft from the request

Draft a purchase order from this approved request, using our PO template.

Fill in everything the request gives you: vendor, description, amounts,
delivery, cost centre.

Apply our standard terms unless the request says otherwise, and say so if
it does.

Leave anything the request does not specify as [MISSING] and list what is
missing at the top. Do not infer a delivery date, a cost centre or a tax
treatment.

Do not draft a PO for a request that has not been approved. Say it is
unapproved and stop.

The list of what is missing, at the top, is what makes this faster rather than just different. A PO with three gaps buried in it takes as long to check as it would have taken to write. The same PO with "missing: cost centre, delivery date" as the first line takes ten seconds to route back to whoever asked.

Keep approval upstream

The request is approved before the PO is drafted, never by drafting it. It is worth being explicit about this in the prompt, because a system that produces official-looking documents from requests will eventually produce one for something nobody agreed to, and the document is what people act on.

Let it chase the gaps

Once the pattern is established, the natural extension is for the employee to go back to the requester for the missing fields rather than to you.

That removes the actual bottleneck, which is rarely the typing. It is the half-day waiting to find out which cost centre it belongs to.

What good looks like

An approved request becomes a complete draft PO in a minute, and the ones that are not complete say exactly why at the top.

The measure is how many POs go out with an error. If that number does not fall, the template or the rules are ambiguous, and the transcription was never the problem.