A purchase requisition is the internal document an employee or department raises to ask for authorization to buy specified goods or services from an outside supplier, before any purchase order is issued. It names what is wanted, what the requester expects it to cost and which budget it would be charged to, and it never leaves the organization. The wider family of requisitions, which also covers drawing material the business already holds and opening an approved position, is in requisitions.
What Is on a Purchase Requisition
Federal buying runs this step on a standard form, and its blocks are a workable inventory of the fields. GSA Form 49 asks for the requisitioning office, the date the request was prepared, the job or project to be charged, the accounting classification the spend will be charged against, and the address the items should be delivered to (GSA Form 49, Requisition/Procurement Request for Equipment, Supplies or Services).
Then the items themselves, one line each, with a stock number where one exists, a clear and full description of the supplies or services, the quantity, the unit of issue such as dozen, square foot or manhour, the unit price, an estimated price for that line and an estimated price for everything requested. Special requirements, restrictions and any required justification go in the description block beside the item they belong to, so the business reason travels with the line it explains (GSA Form 49).
Three signature blocks close it, one for each of three roles: the originator who raised the request, an official authorized to certify that funds are available and the financial data correct, and the official approving the request as required by office policy, for example a supervisor, branch chief or director (GSA Form 49).
The federal form carries no block for a supplier, and addresses the request instead to the stockroom or contracting office named on it (GSA Form 49). A public college’s requisition instruction asks the requester for one directly, with the vendor’s complete address and telephone number, alongside the budget to be charged by account code and object code and a required delivery date given as a real date rather than “ASAP”, “Immediately” or “Rush” (Technical College of the Lowcountry, Institutional Purchase Requisition for Supplies/Services).
What a Purchase Requisition Is For
It is the authorization step and the funding check, and both duties sit on the requisition rather than on the order that follows it. The IRS puts them there in its own manual: internal controls exist to ensure requisitions are approved by an appropriate manager, have adequate funding and comply with current fiscal laws and regulations, and business unit managers review and certify requisitions to ensure they are fully funded and validated by approving officials (IRS, Internal Revenue Manual, 1.35.24.1.3.8 and 1.35.24.1.3.10). Those rules bind a federal agency’s own buying rather than a private firm, so what carries over to a CPA firm is the sequence rather than the obligation.
That makes the approved requisition the evidence that spend was permitted before anybody committed to it, and in fund accounting it is also where budget gets reserved ahead of the order, a sequence walked through in the procure to pay process. Raising one still posts nothing to the general ledger, on the timing test set out in incurred.
Common Questions
A purchase requisition asks inside the organization for permission to spend, while a purchase order goes outside it as an offer to a named supplier that can bind the buyer once the supplier accepts.
The person or department that needs the item, which on the federal form is the originator who signs it. Whoever prepares it should not be the person who approves it, and neither of them should approve the supplier’s invoice later; that separation of duties, and what a business does when it has too few people for it, is set out in requisitions.
Accountably places trained offshore accountants inside US CPA and EA firms, and a firm can put a block of its own payables work through a trial task before any client file depends on it.
