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Order Inquiry Searching by Customer's PO (Purchase Order) Number

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Q - Can I find a sales order by customer's PO Number?  I may or may not know the customer number.

A - Yes, you can.  To do so will require enabling the "Duplicate PO Check" feature. You can go to Global Setup -> Cop-Func -> Order Header Screen, and find the following flag to see if this feature is already enabled:

5. Duplication Criteria For PO # in Sale Order ? 

The following are values for these flags:

  • N = This feature will be disabled
  • P = Check Duplicate by PO Number only
  • C = Check Duplicate by Customer + PO Number
  • S = Check Duplicate by Customer + Ship-To + PO Number
"S" is the most common setting we recommend if you should turn on this feature. As the wording of this flag implies, when you set this flag to "S," it means the system will check to see if an entered Customer PO Number is a duplicate. Therefore, if you receive a PO from a customer for the same ship-to location with the same PO number as another existing order, the the system is going to display a warning message that this PO number is a duplicate. If you do business with, say, chain stores, your salesman may send in the PO.  Then your customer may send in the same PO directly to you.  It is quite possible that your customer service rep may enter the duplicate order into the system without realizing it. Then, by the time of delivery, your customer is going to reject the second duplicate order.

So this feature is valuable in preventing you from potentially entering a duplicate sales order. If you set it to “C,” then it means if the PO number is duplicated for the same customer, and the system will give you a warning. If you set it to “P,” it means that if duplicate PO numbers exist, regardless of which customer, the system will give you a warning. “N” turns off this feature.  Since this is a warning message, you can bypass the message if you should so desire.

After you enable this feature, the system will prompt you to answer another question: 

Checking for Duplication Over if PO# is All Alphabetic ?

The default value means that if you enter a PO number something like “THANK YOU BRIAN” (i.e., all alphabetic characters), then the system has the intelligence to know that this is not a real PO and this duplicate checking will not take place. See example below.


To support this feature, the system needs to build an external index table, CPPOREF, which Elliott will keep updated in real time as the sales order is added, changed or deleted. Now that the system has the index table CPPOREF, Elliott can also support searching by PO number, as well as ship-to (as long as the ship-to order has a PO number.) Once you turn on this feature, before you can use it you need to go to COP -> Util-Setup -> Generate PO Reference. This utility will go through the CPORDHDR table and rebuild the CPPOREF table. You should only do this after hours. 

If you already had this feature turned on before, then you don't have to "Generate PO Reference" again since system will self maintain the CPPOREF index table. Therefore, you can just go directly to the following areas to search sales order by customer's purchase order number:

(1) Search by Customer and PO Number

COP -> Inquiry -> Order Inquiry -> Inquiry -> Order Inquiry by Customer/Order. Enter a customer number. Then at the "Order No" field, you will see the "F7/F8=Srch PO/Ship-To" option. Press F7 to search by PO number for this customer.  See attached screen below.


(2) Search by Customer and Ship-To Number

The search by customer's ship-to is a added bonus of maintaining CPPOREF index table.  You can go to COP -> Inquiry -> Order Inquiry -> Inquiry -> Order Inquiry by Customer/Order. Enter a customer number. Then at the "Order No" field, you will see the "F7/F8=Srch PO/Ship-To" option. Press F8 to search by ship-to for this customer.  

Keep in mind that the search by ship-to feature is based on the CPPOREF table. If a sales order does not have a PO number, then the corresponding index record will not be written to the CPPOREF table.  So you won't be able to search that sales order with a ship-to feature here.  Fortunately, from our real world experience, most of the orders that have a ship-to tend to have a purchase order number on the sales order as well.

(3) Search by PO Number Only

If you don't know the customer number, but you have the PO number, you can find the sales order by going to COP -> Inquiry -> Order Inquiry -> Inquiry -> Order Inquiry by Customer/Order. Skip the customer number by pressing F1 Then at the "Order No" field, press F7 to search by PO Number.  In the search window, hit enter at the customer number, then you can search by PO Number only.  See sample screen below:


You can also search PO in Order Entry buy going to COP -> Processing -> Order Entry -> Change, then at Order No. field press F7 to Search PO to do the same.

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