Pay on a Purchase Order: Schools, Clubs, Councils and Businesses

If you work for a school, an academy trust, a council or a business of any size, you already know the problem. You find the kit, you get the prices approved, and then you discover the supplier has nowhere to put a purchase order number — so the order goes through on somebody's own card and lives in expenses for three months.

A supplier who cannot take a PO is a supplier your finance office cannot use. So we built it in properly.

A PO number field in the basket

There is a purchase order field in the basket on every side of the site, and in the basket drawer too. Type your PO number, save it, and it travels through to the order as a structured field of its own — not buried in a free-text order note that nobody can filter, search or reconcile against.

It appears on your order paperwork where your finance team expects to find it.

Attach the PO document itself

You can also upload the PO document — the PDF your finance system generated — and it rides along with the order. One document per basket, replaceable right up until you check out, and the filename you chose is the filename we see.

That is usually the difference between an order that goes straight through and an order that sits in a queue while somebody emails a PDF back and forth.

We can make it compulsory for your account

If your organisation genuinely cannot raise an order without a PO number, tell us and we will set your account so the site will not let anyone check out without entering one. That covers both routes to the checkout, so it cannot be skipped by accident.

Two other things we can set on a trade account:

• A standing reference, pre-filled into the field for every order, for organisations that work to one rolling PO.
• A required prefix. If every PO your finance office issues starts PO- or SCH-, we can have the site refuse anything that does not, so a number your finance office would reject never gets as far as an order.

A rejected PO is a delayed delivery and a phone call for everyone. Better to catch it in the basket.

It works with everything else

A PO order is a normal order. You can still:

• Personalise the kit — see what personalisation costs
• Order a whole squad or staff list from a spreadsheet — see team and staff orders
• Take the automatic 10% over £100 and free UK delivery over £300

Reordering

Sign in and your past orders are on your account page, with a reorder button that puts the whole basket back — every garment, every name, every number, every logo placement, exactly as it was ordered. For a school reordering the same PE kit each September, that is the whole job done in one click, with a fresh PO number on top.

If a product has been discontinued since, it tells you which one before it builds the basket, rather than letting you find out at the training ground.

Set it up

• Purchase orders — sports and teamwear
• Purchase orders — workwear

To have a PO requirement, a standing reference or a prefix set on your account, email sales@eastpointsports.net with your organisation's details.

Buying for a whole organisation regularly? A corporate shop puts your approved garments on their own page so departments order for themselves.

Back to the launch announcement