Purchase Requisition vs Purchase Order: Who Signs What
A purchase requisition asks your own company for approval; a purchase order commits you to a supplier. Side-by-side table, approval hand-off, matching checks.
Bottom line
Use a requisition to decide whether to buy and a purchase order to commit to a supplier. If you only adopt one control first, make it the receiving record, because without it neither document protects you at invoice time.
Is it right for you?
- Confirm each open purchase order links to an approved requisition or a documented exemption.
- Put spend thresholds on the requisition step, where rejection is still free.
- Record a goods receipt before AP matches the invoice, so quantity errors surface.
- Write the price and quantity tolerance into the AP system, not into reviewers' heads.
- Change a PO only through a dated amendment the supplier has seen.
The short answer
A purchase requisition (PR) is an internal request. An employee or department asks the business for permission to buy something, and nobody outside the company sees it. A purchase order (PO) comes after that request is approved. Procurement or finance sends it to one supplier, and once the supplier accepts it, the company is committed to pay for what it lists.
SAP's Ariba training material puts the split plainly: the requisition is "an approvable document created by a user" that can be edited, changed or cancelled, while the purchase order is "a legal document, created by the system" that is "never edited directly" and is "sent to one supplier." One approved requisition can produce several POs if the items come from different vendors.
Amazon Business sums up the requisition's job as documentation: it "creates a formal record of what was requested, who requested it, why it's needed, and at what estimated cost, all before anyone spends a dollar." A purchase order records something else, namely the agreed price, quantity, delivery date and payment terms the supplier has accepted.
Side-by-side: requisition, purchase order and invoice
Most confusion comes from treating the three documents as versions of the same form. They are owned by different people and answer different questions. The table below lines them up on the dimensions an AP team actually checks.
| Dimension | Purchase requisition | Purchase order | Supplier invoice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who creates it | Requester or department | Procurement / finance (often generated by the system from the approved PR) | The supplier |
| Who sees it | Internal only | Your company and one supplier | Your AP team |
| What it answers | Should we buy this at all? | What exactly are we buying, at what price and terms? | What do we owe for what was delivered? |
| Binding? | No. It can be rejected or edited | Yes, once the supplier accepts it | It is a claim for payment, checked against the PO |
| Typical fields | Item, estimated cost, justification, cost center, need-by date | PO number, agreed unit prices, quantities, delivery and payment terms | Invoice number, PO reference, billed quantities and amounts |
| Changes after approval | Change or cancel request | Formal PO amendment (change order) | Credit note or corrected invoice |
| Role in three-way match | None directly | Leg 1 | Leg 3 (receipt is leg 2) |
The requisition sits outside the match entirely. That surprises people who assume the PR is "the first document" auditors compare. It is the evidence that a purchase was authorized; the PO, receiving record and invoice are the evidence that you paid for what you agreed to and actually received.
Where the hand-off happens
Amazon Business describes the requisition flow as roughly five steps: submit the form, check budget and approved vendors, route to the right approvers by amount or category, approve or reject, then convert the approved PR into a PO that goes to the vendor. Its own summary line is that no PO can be issued until the requisition is approved.
The conversion step is the boundary that matters. Before it, a rejected request costs nothing but time. After it, a cancelled order may involve a supplier who has already shipped. That is why approval thresholds belong on the requisition. Stampli's purchase-to-pay guide gives an example policy of routing all purchases under $25,000 to the requester's direct supervisor, so the finance director keeps oversight of large purchases without approving every request; the right number depends on your own spend profile, so treat that as an illustration.
Five mistakes that break the match later
These are failure points you can check against your own process. Each one shows up downstream as an invoice exception.
1. Skipping the PR for "small" items, then raising a PO anyway. Check: every open PO should trace back to an approved PR or to a written exemption (for example, a blanket contract).
2. Editing quantities on the PO without a change order. Check: if the invoice quantity differs from the PO, look for a dated amendment before blaming the supplier.
3. No receiving record. GEP's three-way matching guide lists quantities "ordered vs. received vs. invoiced" among the fields compared. Without a goods receipt, the match has only two legs and quantity errors pass straight through.
4. Tolerances nobody wrote down. GEP's guide gives examples such as "price variances within 2% or $50, or quantity variances within 1%." Check: is your tolerance documented in the AP system, or applied by whoever happens to review the invoice?
5. Bills entered by hand next to a converted PO. In QuickBooks Online this produces the double-count covered in our QuickBooks purchase order vs. bill walkthrough.
Where both documents sit in the full purchase-to-pay cycle
Stampli's guide breaks purchase-to-pay into eight steps: purchase requisition, purchase approval, purchase order creation, PO issued to vendor, delivery and receipt, accounts payable processing, three-way matching, and invoice approval and payment. The requisition covers the first two. The PO covers the next two. Everything after that is about proving the PO was honored.
That split also tells you who to ask when something goes wrong. A missing approval is a requisition problem and belongs to the requester's manager. A wrong price on the order is a PO problem and belongs to procurement, because, as Stampli describes it, the procurement manager finds the supplier, negotiates price, delivery and payment terms, and copies the requisition details into the PO. A quantity short-ship is a receiving problem. GEP adds that for services, budget owners usually play the receiving role by confirming the work was completed.
The Amazon Business guide makes a related point about the first half of the cycle: the whole requisition process is internal, and no vendor contact happens until a PO is issued. If a supplier already has your order details before the requisition is approved, the control has been bypassed even if the paperwork is filed later.
Two-way, three-way or four-way: how much checking the PO needs
Not every purchase order needs the same depth of matching, and this is where the requisition's purpose (should we buy it?) and the PO's purpose (what did we agree to?) start to diverge. GEP describes three levels:
| Match level | Documents compared | GEP's suggested use |
|---|---|---|
| Two-way | Invoice and PO | Low-risk spend such as subscriptions, utilities and recurring fixed-fee services |
| Three-way | Invoice, PO and goods receipt | The default for physical goods and documentable services |
| Four-way | Invoice, PO, goods receipt and an inspection or acceptance report | Categories where defects are costly, such as pharmaceuticals, aerospace, medical devices, food production or capital equipment |
GEP's advice is to segment: two-way for defined low-risk categories, three-way as the default, and four-way only where quality risk justifies it. The requisition does not change between these levels. It still records who asked, why, and against which budget, which is what an auditor checks when the question is authorization and not delivery.
Tolerances work the same way. Stampli's example sets a 3% price matching threshold that auto-approves invoices under $10,000 when prices are within 3% of the PO. Treat both vendors' numbers as illustrations to calibrate against your own invoice history, not as a standard.
Do small businesses need both documents?
Not always. A five-person company where the owner approves every purchase can let the PO itself carry the approval, because the requester and approver are effectively the same person. The requisition starts paying for itself once people who spend money are not the people who own the budget, which in practice means multiple departments or a remote team.
If you are setting up the PO side first, our purchase order template lists the fields a supplier expects, and the small-business PO software roundup compares tools that generate POs from approved requests. When approval routing is the bigger pain than PO creation, start with invoice approval software instead.