A purchase requisition (PR) is the internal form an employee fills out to request permission to buy something — before any money leaves the company. It travels through approvers, gets a yes or no, and only then turns into a purchase order sent to a supplier. The PO is what the supplier sees. The PR is what stays inside your company.
Think of a requisition as the "I'd like to spend money on this" message, and the purchase order as the "we agreed, please ship it" message. The first is an internal control. The second is a legal commitment to a third party.
A simple example. A warehouse supervisor at a 30-person company runs low on packing tape. She opens an internal form, enters: "100 cases of 2-inch clear tape, vendor X, $480, needed by Friday." Her manager approves it. Finance confirms there's budget. The system generates a PO, emails it to vendor X, and the tape ships. If anyone later asks "why did we spend $480 on tape?" — the requisition shows who asked, who approved, and against which budget line.
Without the requisition step, anyone with a corporate card can buy anything, and finance finds out at the end of the month. With it, every spend has a paper trail.
The clearest way to keep them straight:
| Purchase Requisition (PR) | Purchase Order (PO) | |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Internal — your approvers | External — the supplier |
| Purpose | Request approval to spend | Place a legally binding order |
| Comes first? | Yes | No, PO follows the approved PR |
| Legally binding? | No | Yes, once accepted by the supplier |
| Includes vendor terms? | Often optional | Always |
| Who writes it? | The requester (anyone) | Procurement / buyer |
| Status flow | Submitted → Approved/Rejected | Sent → Acknowledged → Received → Closed |
A PR can be rejected; a PO usually can't be cancelled without a fee. That's the practical reason the requisition step exists — it's your last chance to say no for free.
The standard PR workflow at most companies looks like this:
Smaller companies collapse this to two or three steps. Larger ones split step 2 into multiple manager levels based on dollar thresholds (e.g., supervisor approves up to $1,000, director up to $25,000, VP above).
A usable requisition form has these fields. Cut anything not on the list — extra fields just slow people down:
That's a complete PR in about 11 fields. Anything beyond that is either company-specific compliance (project codes, capital vs expense flag) or noise.
Requisitions are friction. They're worth it when the spend is large, recurring, or auditable. They're overhead when the spend is tiny and the requester is trusted.
You can reasonably skip PRs for:
A two-person company has no business running purchase requisitions. A 200-person company has no business not running them. The transition usually happens around 15–25 employees, when "I'll just ask the founder" stops scaling.
StockZip lets you raise a requisition from a low-stock alert, route it to the right approver, and convert it to a PO in one click — with the original requester, approver, and timestamp on the audit trail forever. See the purchasing workflow.
Straight answers about spreadsheets, scanners, offline work, existing systems, and the free period.
No. A requisition is internal — it’s how an employee asks permission to buy something. A purchase order is external — it’s the document sent to the supplier once the requisition is approved. The requisition always comes first.