Closing obsolete Purchase Orders

As a best business process practice, departments are encouraged to run a report that identifies each open purchase order (PO) COA obligation. Regular periodic review of this report will help departments understand their outstanding financial obligations via POs.

To help departments identify and review PO’s with an outstanding obligation, they should run the following report:

•   Find Purchase Order by Cost Center – Yale

Once run, they will need to check “Exclude Fully Invoiced Lines” so that results only include POs with remaining obligation amounts. 

For additional details on the actions that may be required, refer to the previously published guidelines.

Once this has been done, departments will be able to clearly see which PO’s are still open and decide which of those should be closed. After that decision has been made, departments can create a purchase requisition and note the PO on it to be closed. Up to 50 PO numbers can be listed on a spreadsheet. Lastly, the spreadsheet gets attached to the purchase requisition which is then submitted the  for processing.

Please consider doing this now as opposed to the end of the fiscal year, when the volume of requests prior to fiscal year closing is very high. Remember, if the Obligation Amount Remaining is $0.00, there is no need to request that this PO be closed.