When printing purchase orders (PO), it is possible that a buyer may need to look at multiple separate POs at the same time. What this means is that the buyer will be in Purchase Order Processing adding or changing an order. After having added or modified their order, they will prompted if they want to print their PO immediately.

One can repeat this exact same process for a second PO and have this second PO printed while still keeping the first printed PO open. The issue with this is that the Purchase Order Processing module traditionally did not allow for two POs to be printed simultaneously. If you had two instances of Purchase Order Processing running and you printed one PO and printed the second one without closing the first Purchase Order Processing instance, the following error would occur:

The reason this error occurs is because while the second PO was printing, the first PO was waiting for the buyer to confirm that the PO was printed properly. Only after the first PO is confirmed to have printed properly will the error not be thrown for the second PO.

This feature of confirming that a PO is printed properly before the user is allowed to print a second PO is a legacy feature from back in the day when people used dot matrix printers. Back then, paper alignment or jamming was a common issue and so this confirmation prompt was a necessary feature. Nowadays, we have laser printers and digital technology. As such, waiting for the user to confirm the PO is printed properly is outdated, and this feature gives the Elliott administrator the means to bypass this message.

As it stands, the most updated version of Elliott will no longer throw any errors if multiple orders are printed simultaneously. However, the Elliott administrator is given the option to remove the message "Are Purchase Orders Just Printed Ok ?" if they would like.