Product
The Purchase List Is Where a Buy Plan Waits for a Second Look
Some buying decisions are finished the moment you make them. Most aren’t. The Purchase List is where the unfinished ones wait while you review the rest of the plan.
A requisition is not a purchase order
Procurement practice keeps two documents apart. A requisition is internal: it lets a business control spending before anyone commits money. A purchase order, once it’s sent, is a commitment to a supplier, who plans production, picks stock, and books freight against it; changing it afterwards usually means a formal change order. Teams keep the two separate so the thinking happens on the internal side, where it’s cheap.
A row on the Smart Buying Table sits firmly on the thinking side. The suggested quantity is something you check, adjust, and argue with, every change carries a was→now chip with per-row undo, and nothing is committed until you create the order. The risk isn’t in the table. It’s in how you leave it. Creating orders row by row as each one looks right turns one review into a series of separate decisions, and the early rows are settled before you’ve seen the later ones.
What a staging area does for a buy plan
Assisty gives that thinking side a place to live. As you work through the buying table, you can add items to the Purchase List instead of creating orders: select the rows and choose Add to Purchase List, or just ask: “Add the low-stock mugs to my purchase list.” The list holds them, priced with each supplier’s tax and currency, until you’ve finished reviewing and are ready to order.
That pricing is what makes “Keep reviewing” a real option rather than an awkward pause. A staged list that showed only unit costs would be a shopping list; a list priced with each supplier’s tax and currency is a buy plan you can total. You see what the staged order comes to while every part of it is still open.
The trade-offs happen on the table. Tell Atlas “I have $1,000 to spend” and fit-to-budget defers the least-urgent items and shows exactly what got cut. The Purchase List doesn’t redo that work. It holds the priced result while you finish the rest of the table.
Two buttons, one selection at a time
The selection bar on the buying table offers Add to Purchase List and Create purchase orders side by side. That placement matters: staging isn’t a mode you switch on for a session. It’s a choice you make per selection, every time you have rows ticked.
Create purchase orders works on the selection in front of it. Atlas splits those rows into one PO per supplier and asks which location receives the stock. Each create splits only the rows in that selection, so the plan gets settled in pieces. Stage first and create once, and one review becomes one purchase order per supplier. The bigger benefit is that the plan stayed one list until you were done with it.
When to order on the spot, and when to stage
Order on the spot when the decision is self-contained. A row the table flags as running out before a reorder can land, from one supplier, with nothing else competing for the money, doesn’t get better with a second look; it only gets later. The same goes for starting a purchase order for a supplier directly, by chat or in the UI, when you already know what you need from them.
Stage when the review is still in progress: several suppliers in play, a budget not yet settled, or a row that depends on a decision elsewhere in the table you haven’t made. Creating orders then settles part of a plan whose other half you haven’t looked at. The question to ask isn’t “is this row right?” but “could anything I haven’t reviewed yet change it?” If the answer is yes, it belongs on the list.
| Aspect | Order on the spot | Stage on the Purchase List |
|---|---|---|
| When it fits | One self-contained decision, often urgent: a single supplier and a clear stockout risk | Review still in progress: several suppliers, a budget in play, rows that depend on each other |
| What’s created | A drafted PO per supplier for this selection, still to review and email | Nothing yet; the list holds your picks, priced, until you choose Create purchase orders |
| Changing your mind | Drafts already exist for these rows | Nothing has been drafted; the plan is still one list |
| Budget trade-offs | Rows ordered early are settled before later ones are weighed | Weighed on the buying table with fit-to-budget; the list holds the priced result |
| Supplier split | Each selection is split on its own | One PO per supplier for the whole reviewed list, in one step |
After the list
When the review is done, Create purchase orders treats the list the way it treats any selection: it splits by supplier, with exact item counts and order values, and asks which location receives the stock. What comes out is a draft for each supplier. You review its lines and email it from there. How the split works, and what has to survive it, is covered in Splitting a Reorder Across Suppliers; choosing where the stock lands is covered in One Order, Two Warehouses. Staging changes one input to that step: the selection being split is the whole reviewed plan, not whichever rows you’d reached when you pressed the button.