Manage your Purchase Orders with Airtable
Jul 17, 2025
Pazhamalai
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Airtable is a powerful tool for managing purchase orders with flexibility and ease. With the right setup, you can efficiently request goods or services from your suppliers—saving time and reducing errors. You can even automate the creation of purchase orders in various ways, such as:
When a product's stock falls below its reorder point
On a fixed schedule (e.g., biweekly orders)
Through a manual workflow based on real-time demand
In this blog, we’ll cover:
How to set up your Purchase Order table in Airtable
How to automatically generate Purchase Orders based on stock levels
How to send Purchase Orders to your suppliers
This guide assumes you are already familiar with the basics of Airtable i.e creating tables and linked records. If you're new, I highly recommend that you read Airtable's Guide.
Purchase Order Table Setup
In this section, we'll build a table structure to store purchase order information. A Purchase Order typically includes details about the supplier, a list of products being ordered (each with its own quantity and unit price), along with any terms and conditions, and the total cost of the order.
Let's first create our Products table and Suppliers Table.
Tip : Ask Airtable Omni to create a Products, Suppliers, Purchase Order table and fill in some sample data. It will provide you with a decent table schema. You can then customize the tables as per below or suiting your needs.
Create Products Table
First let's create a Products table with the following fields
Product Id : Auto-number or a unique identifier
Product Name : Text field
Product Variant : Text or single select field
Quantity Available : Number field
Reorder Points : Number field
Unit Price : Currency Field
Create Suppliers Table
Now we'll setup our Suppliers table. Our Suppliers table consists of the following fields
Supplier Id : Auto-number or a unique identifier
Supplier Name : Text field
Email : Email field
Phone Number : Phone number field
Address : Text or Multi line text field
Products Supplied : Link to Products Table
Notes : Text or Multi line text field
Create Purchase Order & Line Items table
Next we will create a table for Purchase Order. We need to be able to link multiple products with varying quantities to our order. So we will be creating a Line Items table or a Junctions table, along with our Purchase Order table to represent each line item as a record. We should also be able to track our PO effectively. So we add a status field to denote the PO status. Status field can be either one of draft, ordered, pending, received or canceled.
Let's create a Purchase Order table with the following fields
Purchase Order Id : Auto-number or a unique identifier
Order Created Date : Date field
Expected Delivery Date : Date field
Received Date : Date field (We'll mark this once we receive the order)
Supplier : Link to Suppliers Table
Order Status : Single select field (draft, ordered, pending, received, canceled)
Responsible User : User field
PO Document : Attachments field (To store generated pdf document here)
Notes : Text or Multi line text field
Our Purchase order table is still not complete. We haven't linked it with products and we don't have a total amount or price field. We'll come back to this after creating line items table.
Let's create our Purchase Order Line Item table with the following fields
Line Item Id : Auto-number or a unique identifier
Purchase Order : Link to Purchase Order table
Products : Link to Products table
Product Name : Lookup from Products Table
Product Variant : Lookup from Products Table
Quantity : Number field
Unit Price : Lookup from Products table
Line Item Price : Formula field ( Quantity * {Unit Price})
After these steps you would also notice that reciprocal fields have been created in Purchase Order table showing the line items column. Also in suppliers table you will find the linked Purchase Orders.
At last, in the Purchase Order table add a rollup field to compute the total price
Total Amount : Rollup field (Based on the Line Item Price field from Line Item's table)
Auto create Purchase Orders based on Reorder points
Our goal here is to automatically create a PO, when a Product Quantity goes below Reorder Points in our Products table. Let's create an Automation that runs when a Product goes below reorder point. Make sure to add some sample data to test the automation.
Setup Trigger for Airtable Automation
Let's create a new Airtable automation and set trigger as "Record Matches Condition". In Airtable automation we cannot directly specify a condition comparing two fields (Quantity and Reorder Points). So let's quickly create a formula field with name "Is Low on Stock?" in Products table with formula ({Quantity Available} < {Reorder Points}).
In the automation trigger step select Purchase Order table and set condition as "Is Low on Stock?" field equals value 1 .
Find a Supplier from Suppliers Table
Ok we have our trigger setup complete. Before creating a Purchase Order, we need to select a vendor. Vendors can be selected based on various parameters, but here we'll keep it simple. We just select a vendor who can supply the product that is low on inventory. So let's add a find record option and select table as "Supplier". And the set the condition saying whether the products supplied by the supplier, has the product we are looking for.
Create a Purchase Order entry
Now add a "Create Record" step to create our purchase order. We will add the supplier we found to the purchase order and specify the order creation date.
Add the Out Of Stock product as Line Item
At last let's create our line items and link it with the created purchase order. Add one more "Create Record" action and specify product from the trigger and purchase order from the trigger step. You can either manually specify the Quantity or add a formula field to Products table to denote how much to order for.
Great. Our automation is now ready. Change any product's stock to be less than the reorder point. The automation will choose a supplier and generate a purchase order record.
Generate Purchase Order Document
While you can use Page Designer extension to create a PDF document, it cannot be done in a automated way. So we'll be using FlexiPage to automate this process.
Now that we have created our tables (fill in some sample data too), let's create a document template for Purchase Order. From the Airtable marketplace, install FlexiPage extension. You will be prompted for an API token. Follow the instructions on the screen to login to FlexiPage. Click on "Create Document" in FlexiPage extension and choose Purchase Order template. Make sure the document created is linked to Purchase Order table (you can find this in right side panel)
Replace all the static information like Purchase Order Id, Vendor Name, Vendor Address, Ship to information etc… with fields from your Purchase Order table. You can type '@' to bring in fields from Purchase Order table. Once you added relevant fields in all the places click on Preview toggle to check everything is getting displayed correctly.
We have to display purchase order line items in our document. Click on the table and in the right side panel, in select field option, choose Purchase Order Line Items field from the Purchase Order table. Then in the first row (row below the heading row), type '@' and this will bring in fields from Purchase Order Line Items table. Toggle the preview to check if the purchase order document is in good shape. Save the document.
All that's remaining is to generate the pdf document for a purchase order. Preview your document template using the preview toggle and download a sample PDF to check if everything looks good. Now click on the Automation code icon (right-most icon in the toolbar), select an attachment field to store the document ("PO Document" from our setup) and copy the code.
Now extend our Automation by adding one more action called "Run Script" and paste the code inside the editor. Add "RECORD_ID" as an input variable and select Airtable Record ID from the first "Create Record" step of creating Purchase Order. You can also follow the documentation for a video tutorial for setting up document automation.
Click on Finish Editing and turn on the automation. Now if you update a Product to have quantity less than reorder point, this automation gets triggered, creates a PO and PO line item entry, runs a script and stores the generated PDF in Airtable.
Send Purchase Order to Vendor
Now all the hard parts are over, sending PO in email is pretty simple. We will add two more steps to our Automation. First one is a "Find Record" action and then "Send Email" action. Why Find Record step? Think of each step in the automation has a snapshot of the table they are working with. Now the script runs and adds the document to the PO table. But none of the previous steps has this information as their snapshots of records are created before the script runs. So we add a "Find Record" step to fetch the latest version of Purchase Order. In the "Find Record" step, select the table as Purchase Order and specify the condition as record id equals the record id from the first "Create Record" step.
At last create a "Send an Email" action, select email from the vendor record and upload the attachments from Purchase Order record.
Update the automation with these latest changes. And now if you update a product's quantity to be less than the reorder point it will
Find a Vendor who supplies the product
Creates a Purchase Order entry (along with Purchase order line items)
Generates a PDF document and stores it in a attachment field
Sends the Purchase order to the vendor
Conclusion
The amount of flexibility that Airtable offers here is remarkable. You can extend or modify these systems to a greater extent. For example, you could have an approval workflow to just manually verify before sending it to supplier. You could create PO's in bulk twice every week. You could select the vendors based on delivery time and price. You could setup PO Requisition form etc.. Apart from the flexibility Airtable offers, I like Airtable because it is fun to create system's from scratch and adapt it to your business needs.