Operating purchase orders

With write access, a connected assistant can do more than read your purchase orders — it can operate them: create drafts, send them, record supplier confirmations, book received goods, complete orders, and keep payments up to date. This page explains what that covers, what the guardrails are, and what you’ll see in Logistified and Shopify while it happens.

What the assistant can do with purchase orders

Everything a purchase order goes through in the app, the assistant can now drive too:

Create draft purchase orders (optionally with line items).
Edit the order — name, number, supplier, location, dates, notes, shipping cost — and add, change, or remove line items.
Send the order to mark it on its way to the supplier.
Record confirmations from the supplier — line by line, or everything at once.
Receive goods — partially or fully, including rejected or cancelled quantities.
Reverse a mistaken receipt (un-receive).
Complete the order, or finish an in-progress order in one step (quick complete).
Pause, dispute, cancel, or reopen an order.
Delete orders that are drafts or already cancelled.
Record, edit, and remove payments.
Manage the shipment — add or remove a shipment record on the order.
Set billing and shipping addresses on the order.
Apply or reverse supplier credits against the order total.
Add a custom line item — a free-form line that isn’t tied to a specific product variant.
Split an order by supplier or create separate orders for each supplier from a mixed list of items.
Run recovery actions when Shopify numbers look stale (see below).

What it takes

Write access is opt-in. The assistant needs either:

an API key created with write scope — see API keys, or
a web chat connection that was granted write access when it was linked — see Connect a web chat.

A read-only connection sees none of these actions — they aren’t even visible to it, and any attempt to use them fails. Existing connections keep the scope they were granted; to upgrade a chat, revoke it and reconnect with a write-scope code.

A full lifecycle, end to end

Here’s what you’d observe in the app if you asked an assistant to handle an order from start to finish:

Draft. The assistant creates the purchase order, resolving your SKUs to products and filling in costs from the supplier’s catalogue where you haven’t specified them.
Sent. Once a receiving location is set, it sends the order. Product tags and incoming-inventory figures start updating, just as if you had clicked Send to Supplier.
Confirmed. As the supplier confirms, the assistant records confirmed quantities per line; the order moves through Partially Confirmed to Confirmed, or it confirms everything at once — which also starts the order (In Progress) and stamps the shipping date.
Received. When goods arrive, it books received quantities. Partial deliveries show as Partially Received; expected incoming quantities shrink as stock comes in.
Completed. It completes the order. If you use automatic cost syncing, costs are written back first — and if that can’t finish (for example a missing exchange rate), the order stays in its current status and the assistant is told exactly what to fix.

Every step shows up in the purchase order’s activity log and in the UI exactly as if it had been done by hand — same statuses, same side effects, same screens.

Shipment management

The assistant can add a shipment record to a purchase order — carrier, tracking number, estimated and actual arrival dates — and remove it if needed. Shipment details are informational and don’t affect the order’s lifecycle status.

Addresses

The assistant can set or update the billing address and shipping address on a purchase order, and clear them if needed. These addresses appear on generated documents (PDF purchase orders, etc.).

Supplier credits

When a supplier owes you credits — from a return or a manual credit issued in the supplier ledger — the assistant can apply them to reduce a purchase order’s outstanding balance:

See which credits are available for a purchase order’s supplier and which have already been applied.
Apply one or more credits to the order.
Reverse a credit application if it was applied in error. Reversing puts the credit back in the supplier’s ledger so it can be re-applied elsewhere.

Splitting and combining purchase orders

If a purchase order has items from multiple suppliers — or you want to reorganise items across orders — the assistant can:

Split an order by supplier — create one new order per supplier from the existing order’s items.
Create separate orders from a list of items — given a set of items and their intended suppliers, the assistant builds the individual purchase orders in one step.

These operations are useful when you receive a mixed-supplier quote and want to move it into properly separated orders.

Guardrails

The assistant follows the same lifecycle rules as the app, enforced strictly:

Only valid moves. Each status only allows its legitimate next steps. An invalid move is refused — and the refusal message names the allowed targets, so the assistant immediately knows the right next step.
Completed is earned, not set. An order can’t simply be flipped to Completed; it has to go through completing, which runs cost syncing first. Likewise, receiving statuses are reached by actually booking received quantities.
Deletes are cancel-first. Only drafts and cancelled orders can be deleted. Anything else must be cancelled first — cancelled orders are soft-deleted, so the audit trail is preserved.
No silent data loss. Quantities that have been received or synced block backwards moves and line deletions until they’re reversed properly.
Every refusal is guidance. When an action is blocked, the error tells the assistant which rule applied and which action to use instead. A capable assistant self-corrects without your involvement.

What happens in Shopify

Tags, incoming-inventory quantities, and product fields update through the same queued pipeline the app itself uses. Changes are queued and applied asynchronously, so they can take a moment to appear in Shopify. After each action, the assistant receives a report of which side effects were staged successfully — and, if one failed, what to do about it.

Recovery actions

For the rare cases where Logistified and Shopify disagree, the assistant has the same recovery tools you do:

Manual sync — push received-but-not-yet-synced quantities to Shopify on demand (useful when automatic syncing on receiving is switched off).
Sync reset — clear Logistified’s “already synced” bookkeeping for an order (Shopify itself is untouched), then sync again to re-push everything.
Incoming adjustment — correct a stuck incoming quantity on a completed or cancelled order.

Payments

The assistant can record payments on any order (paying a completed order is normal), update them, and remove them. Two safeguards apply:

Overpayment — a payment that would push the total paid above the order’s value is refused unless explicitly allowed.
Foreign currency — a payment in a currency other than your shop currency requires an exchange rate.

Only payments marked completed count toward the order’s paid badge.

Safety & audit

Every call the assistant makes is logged per API key or connection, and access can be revoked at any time — see Managing access & security. Write access is scoped to your single store, and the assistant can never reach anything beyond the actions described in this documentation.