A Blanket Purchase Order (also known as a standing purchase order) is an agreement arranged between an organization and a supplier to deliver goods or services at a predetermined price on a recurring basis for a specified time period (typically 1 year).

For example, if an organization determines that it submits 10 Purchase Orders per month to a particular vendor it can consolidate all these purchases into a single Blanket Purchase Order and issue 1 for the entire year, rather than 120 separate smaller Purchase Orders.

NetSuite Customer Blanket Purchase Order Management

During Sales Order creation, a sale person could reference an existing purchase order that still had sales capacity available (PO which not fully consumed).

The key to make this work is to use dynamic variables on the sales order that would reveal themselves when the salesperson selected the “–- New -–” option on the Blanket PO drop down selector. The extra fields became visible and then could be used to collect validated information. This demands an advanced use case of the NetSuite SuiteScript toolset to create the intended behavior. The actual software pattern demands both server side UserEvent code to push down the dynamic variables and client side code to show / hide the form elements based on the change of the dropdown selector.

When to use a Blanket Purchase Order

• Repetitive and pre-specified purchases from the same supplier within a certain time period.
• Standardized products or services which require numerous shipments.
• When a quantity discount can be achieved.

When not to use a Blanket Purchase Order

• Unknown pricing at time of purchasing.
• Price is subject to change.
• Quality of product or service is significant.

Blanket orders or call-off orders may also be used for ordering services, for example for maintenance and repair services. In these cases the benefits associated with stock-holding do not arise but the call-off order may allow emergency repairs or on-call maintenance to be arranged easily at guaranteed rates.