Purchase Orders: Empty-State Import, Date Handling, And Editable PO Number

Four updates to creating and importing purchase orders.

Import from the empty state. The purchase orders empty state only offered Create PO, so a company with no purchase orders yet had no way to reach the CSV importer — the import trigger only appeared in the list toolbar, which stays hidden until at least one PO exists. The empty state now has an Import Purchase Orders action alongside Create PO, matching how Products and Suppliers already work.

Month-first dates now import. The importer already advertised MM/DD/YYYY — the default Excel and Google Sheets export — as an accepted format, but read every value day-first. A single such date on a purchase order upload failed the whole file; on demand and historical uploads the same values were silently recorded as the wrong day. All four date-bearing CSV imports now read month-first dates correctly. Day-first values like 25/08/2026 no longer parse, and demand or historical data imported before this fix may carry dates from the earlier misparse.

Ship Date is a purchase order import column. The Ship Date on an existing PO already round-tripped through the export, but the importer would silently drop it on re-upload; it also had no column on new POs, so backfilling historical purchase orders that had already shipped meant hand-editing every one after import. Ship Date is now part of the purchase order import on both create and update rows, and the import UI validates it against the same rules Endless uses everywhere else, rather than whatever the CSV service dashboard happened to be configured for.

The PO Number on a new order is editable. The PO Number at the top of the New Purchase Order drawer is a labelled input. The placeholder shows the number the server would assign next, and the helper text reads “Leave blank to auto-generate”. Type over the placeholder to set a specific number, and the format is validated against your company’s PO number template before save. Leave the field blank and the server assigns the next available number when the order is created, so two operators creating purchase orders side by side each get the next number in sequence. Before this change the PO number rendered as a plain heading — it read like a value already fixed to that order, and the number shown was generated on the client, never sent, and never became the PO’s number.