Donors and PO configuration

How do we configure donors that pay for POs but never come in contact with product. They require PO’s “Bill to” to be made in their name and the “Ship to” to the address of our depot (donor does not have a depot).
On “Create Purchase Form”, “Purchasing Organization” is not selectable.

What permission is required to unlock “Purchasing Organization” on Order page?

The purchasing organization is not linked to a permission. It’s linked to the location that you’re logged into. Every destination has a parent organization and only that parent organization can be the purchasing organization.

So at the moment, there’s no way to change the purchasing organization in the way that you’re hoping. In fact, I believe there’s validation to ensure that the purchasing organization == parent organization of current location.

However, what you’re requesting seems reasonable, so I’ll bring it up with the team to see if this is something we can accommodate.

And at the moment, I don’t have any good ideas on how to track what you want to do.

FWIW, the way we normally handle donations is by setting the donor as the origin. In most cases, this works fine because the donor organization is actually receiving / sending the stock (even though it might be coming from another supplier).

I assume that doesn’t work for you since it seems that you’re trying to represent a more complex relationship.

What I’m realizing after discussion with one of our users, is that we don’t necessarily want to (and possibly can’t) change the purchasing organization to handle the donor relationship. What I think you’re asking for is to add a new role to handle the “bill to” relationship for the PO. Does that seem correct?

For now, if you only need this in the printed PO and invoice then you could create a custom document template and enter the donor information manually.

But we should have a deeper discussion regarding your requirements to make sure we fully understand the use case you’re trying to implement.

In our case donors are mostly financiers - they only pay the bill. Having their name on a PO can be, as you mentioned, worked around. However, having their name on the transaction in the system is what we are after.

Looking at the current situation, we will probably have upward of a hundred or so depots and thousands of donors (financiers). Some donors are one-time only, and others are repetitive.

From what you are describing, to have correct financier on the PO, we have to create a Depot location for every financier. Then we instruct users to remember to switch Location, to the Depot of the financier, each time a PO is created. After PO is created, users have to remember to switch back to their “home” Depot… Am I getting it right?

They don’t need to be depots. They could be the supplier from which stock originates. Technically this isn’t true in your case but it doesn’t seem like it should matter if you need the paper trail. In other words you would think of a purchase order being placed with the donor and the stock originating from that donor. Tracking where the stock actually comes from might matter in which case we shouldn’t implement a workaround, we should figure out how to add a new “bill to” role to the PO.