Drafts
We know that you are busy, so all your orders can be parked in draft form for you to return to later, or if they are not urgent, just save them up for one big checkout.
Draft Orders
When orders are created in the portal, they are always created as drafts. You will see a unique draft order number (DF######) allocated to your order.
Draft orders are held on our servers so that you can leave your order partially created at any time and it will be saved ready for the next time you log in from any device.
You can park a draft order for as long as you like. This is useful when you are building a large order with many staff and you are waiting for information or for the order value to reach a carriage-free threshold.
The portal will periodically remind you that you have draft orders awaiting checkout.
Many companies require an internal purchase order with a set value to be issued before an order is placed.
Draft orders allow the creation of an order detailing the final cost that can be parked awaiting a purchase reference.
Your purchase order references can be entered at the start of an order or at the end of the order, where final values including carriage are displayed.
Drafts and purchase orders
Drafts and Checkout
Draft orders are usually checked out by the buyer that creates them.
However, your draft order will have a 'created by' reference linked to your log on and when you check out it will have an ‘ordered by’ reference, which is linked to the buyer who checked out the order.
Created by and ordered by are usually, but not always, the same person.
For example, you may have multiple buyers in your branch who are authorised to check out each other's orders. This is useful when one person is on holiday, or if one buyer may be blocked from checkout and the draft is escalated to a higher-level user to complete the ordering process.
For further details please see the page on escalation or ask our team.