If you run service work through 11-2, you probably do what we do: one construction job per year acts as the "bucket" for all service work, and every work order and every service PO points at it. That job record is a shell. It has no customer address and no site contact. All of the real location information lives on the individual work order in 11-2.
Sage already knows the PO and the work order go together. When you open a work order in 11-2 and use Options > Purchase Order, Sage creates the PO, fills in the Work Order# field, sets Source to "4 - Work Order," and copies the work order's address into the Job Address fields on the PO. But that is a one-time copy, not a live link.
Here is why the copy isn't enough. The PO screen only has one address block. There is no separate Ship To, so that one address has to do both jobs. Sometimes parts ship to the customer site and the copied address is right. Just as often they ship to our shop or a will-call counter, so purchasing has to overwrite that address with ours. The moment they do, the PO loses the only copy of the customer's location it ever had. Whoever picks up that PO later has no idea which customer it was for without opening 11-2 and searching for the work order number.
We can't work around it in the form designer either. You can drop work order fields onto a PO form and they print blank. You can't write a calculated field that says "if Source is Work Order, go get the location from 11-2," because the Work Order# on the PO isn't connected to 11-2 in the database, and calculated fields can only follow connections that already exist. Other Work Order# fields in Sage, like the ones on Job Costs and Daily Payroll, do connect back to 11-2 for reporting. The one on the purchase order never got the same connection.
What we're asking for, either one would solve it:
1. Give the 6-6-1 Work Order# field the same link to 11-2 that already exists on Job Costs and Daily Payroll, so work order fields can be placed on a PO form like any other related field.
2. Or, let calculated fields look up a record in another table by a matching value, so we could write the logic ourselves.
No new screens needed. The address block on the PO keeps working as the Ship To, and the form pulls the customer's location straight from the work order no matter what was typed in that address. A service PO could then print both:
Ship To (from the PO):
Our warehouse
123445 West Road, Suite 200
Houston, TX 77002
Service Location (from the Work Order):
50700993 - Inspection Repair Job
1 - Jack Johnson High School
22222 Lonestar Way
Houston, TX 77001
Who benefits: any contractor running service work through 11-2 who buys parts on purchase orders.
- Vendors see where to ship and which site the order is for.
- The warehouse can tag and stage parts by customer site instead of by a bucket job number.
- Techs and service job sites can match deliveries to the right work order.
- Resale and tax-exempt certificates can be filled out completely and correctly from the PO, because the actual job site address prints on the document instead of a shell job or our own shop.
- Purchasing stops choosing between a correct Ship To and a correct customer location.
by: Brittany B. | 17 hours ago | Project Management
Comments
We've been working around this for years. When we were writing a handful of service POs a week it was manageable. As our service book has grown, the PO volume has grown with it, and the workaround hasn't scaled.
Every service PO now needs someone to either retype the customer location into the description, open 11-2 to figure out which customer a PO belongs to, or call the vendor to sort out where parts actually went. Multiply that across a warehouse, a purchasing desk, and a service team all pulling from the same bucket job, and procurement gets chaotic fast. Parts get staged under the wrong site, deliveries get matched to the wrong work order, and resale and exempt paperwork comes back incomplete because the PO never showed a real job site address.
It's also extremely inefficient. Because the form can't pull this itself, we end up printing the PO, then editing or re-creating it outside of Sage to add the location and finish the tax paperwork. That means a second copy of the document that Sage doesn't know about, and a step that has to be done by hand every time.
The data is already in the system. The PO already knows its work order number. We just need the form to be able to follow it.