Purchasing provides the following purchase order types:

1. Standard Purchase Orders

You generally create standard purchase orders for one-time purchase of various items. You create standard purchase orders when you know the details of the goods or services you require, estimated costs, quantities, delivery schedules, and accounting distributions. If you use encumbrance accounting, the purchase order may be encumbered since the required information is known.

2. Blanket Purchase Agreements

You create blanket purchase agreements when you know the detail of the goods or services you plan to buy from a specific supplier in a period, but you do not yet know the detail of your delivery schedules. You can use blanket purchase agreements to specify negotiated prices for your items before actually purchasing them.

• Blanket Releases

You can issue a blanket release against a blanket purchase agreement to place the actual order (as long as the release is within the blanket agreement effective dates). If you use encumbrance accounting, you can encumber each release.

3. Contract Purchase Agreements

You create contract purchase agreements with your suppliers to agree on specific terms and conditions without indicating the goods and services that you will be purchasing. You can later issue standard purchase orders referencing your contracts, and you can encumber these purchase orders if you use encumbrance accounting.

4. Planned Purchase Orders

A planned purchase order is a long-term agreement committing to buy items or services from a single source. You must specify tentative delivery schedules and all details for goods or services that you want to buy, including charge account, quantities, and estimated cost.

• Scheduled Releases

You can issue scheduled releases against a planned purchase order to place the actual orders. If you use encumbrance accounting, you can use the planned purchase order to reserve funds for long term agreements. You can also change the accounting distributions on each release and the system will reverse the encumbrance for the planned purchase order and create a new encumbrance for the release.

Purchase Order Types Summary

	Standard Purchase Order	Planned Purchase Order	Blanket Purchase Agreement	Contract Purchase Agreement
Terms and Conditions Known	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Goods or Services Known	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Pricing Known	Yes	Yes	Maybe	No
Quantity Known	Yes	Yes	No	No
Account Distributions Known	Yes	Yes	No	No
Delivery Schedule Known	Yes	Maybe	No	No
Can Be Encumbered	Yes	Yes	No	No
Can Encumber Releases	N/A	Yes	Yes	N/A