# What are purchase orders?

A purchase order is a document You create before placing an order with a supplier. Think of it as a formal request that says "we want to buy this, for this price, and here's who approved it."

Not every company needs them. If Your team handles invoices just fine without tracking orders upfront, You might not use this functionality at all, and that's perfectly OK. 

But if Your company wants to control spending before invoices arrive, purchase orders give You a way to do exactly that.

**Why use purchase orders?**

You probably recognise at least one of these situations:

* Someone orders something without checking the budget first, and You only find out when the invoice lands
* There's no clear trail showing who approved a purchase and when
* Invoices come in and nobody's sure if the amounts match what was originally agreed

Purchase orders solve these by adding a simple step before the money is committed: request it, get it approved, then order.

**Internal and external purchase orders**

In Fitek, You can use purchase orders in two ways:

An **external purchase order** is what You'd send to a supplier. It lists products or services, quantities, prices, and terms. You can export it as a PDF directly from Fitek and send it to Your supplier, no need to recreate it somewhere else.

An **internal purchase order** stays within Your company. Employees or departments create it to get approval before ordering. It never goes to a vendor, it's purely part of Your internal process to make sure the right people sign off before anything is purchased.

**Using purchase orders on their own or with invoices**

You can use purchase orders by themselves, just for approval and control. But they become even more useful when You combine them with invoices. When a purchase order is linked to an invoice, Fitek can help You verify that what was invoiced actually matches what was ordered: the right quantities, the right prices, the right supplier. This means faster approvals and fewer surprises.


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://fitek-learning.fitek.com/fitek-learning-space/latvian-latviesu/purchase-orders/what-are-purchase-orders.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.