Purchase Order Line Consolidation

Occasionally, document initiators contact Purchasing because they have created their Requisition (PR) with separate line items, only to have the Buyer consolidate them into one line item on the Purchase Order (PO). There are two fundamental reasons for this: university reporting and vendor requirements.

Unlike other DaFIS documents, the PO not only captures data for our financial system, it also serves as a binding, legal document. This often presents a conflict between how departments would like data displayed on the PO, how the data must be displayed for university reporting purposes, and how vendors prefer to have it presented on the contract.

Departments often segregate identical items on the PR to correspond with recipients, to split-fund the purchase, and/or for other internal reasons. The problem is that line items on the vendor's copy of the PO (i.e., the contract) print exactly as they appear on the electronic document. When there is no difference in multiple line items on a PO, vendors often think Purchasing has omitted distinguishing specifications. For this reason, and as a general rule-of-thumb, identical items are consolidated on the PO to avoid confusion and processing delays. DaFIS does allow a single line item to be split-funded between multiple accounts. Currently, there is no workaround that will satisfy other departmental desires and vendor requirements.

A few exceptions to this rule occur to accomplish university reporting mandates. For example, whenever an extended warranty is purchased with inventorial equipment, it must, by university policy, be consolidated into a single line item to capture and capitalize the total amount. Another example is to separate identical line items to correspond with different custody codes. When this is a requirement, please state this in a note on the Requisition document. Buyers are aware of this requirement and are on the lookout for such notes. Both of these scenarios result in items displaying on the PO contrary to how most vendors would like to see them. Unfortunately, we currently cannot associate multiple PO line items to a single asset (line) in DaFIS.

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