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Hi, my name is Natasha Hicks and I’m the assistant director here at THEE, and I would like to talk to you about how to get a purchase order. It’s a pretty simple process. The biggest thing is you just need to email our finance email address with your name, the name of the vendor where you want the purchase order, and the amount that you’re wishing to have as your purchase order. It seems pretty straightforward. Staples is a little bit unique, but I’ll go into that in a minute.

There’s just a few things to remember. We start doing purchase orders in the fall and we do them right up until usually about mid-April. The reason that we stop doing them around mid-April is just because it does take us about six weeks to process these purchase orders once you’ve made the purchase in the store, so we need to have it all wrapped up by the end of the school year. That’s why we say kind of mid-April is when we stop issuing purchase orders.

Each purchase order is good for about 30 days. So if you know, you say, “Hey, I want to go make a purchase at Staples, you know, this week or whatever,” and something happens, life happens, whatever, and you’re not able to get there, a couple things can happen. You can just wait until the next week or whatever, but if it does go on longer and you, you know, it’s going to be closer to that month mark, just email us, let us know what’s happened, and we can reinstate a purchase order for you because the store will deny it after 30 days. The reason for that is just we were having outstanding POs that were just never used. Also, we have vendors that sometimes are slow to give us invoices, and so that kind of motivates them as well. And then also for us, because the family can say, “Well, I used that purchase order,” so we can call them and say, “Hey, my family says that they use this purchase order, could you send me the invoice?” and then we can pay them. So it’s pretty simple.

As I stated earlier about Staples, it’s a little different for Staples. The big reason for that is Staples obviously sells a lot of things that are not actually items that would be covered by Alberta Education, you know, for example, those coffee pods for your Keurig or your desk or something like that. Those are all things that unfortunately we can’t reimburse for. So we can’t give you a purchase order for. So with Staples, we actually have a form that we get you to fill out. If you send us an email, Kristen’s the one who will be doing up the POs, and she will send you another form that we want you to fill out with just kind of, you don’t have to itemize exactly everything that you’re going to purchase from Staples, so if it is things like, you know, pens, pencils, pencil crayons, whatever, you can just be brief with that. It doesn’t have to be like, you know, “Crayola blah blah blah” exactly what you’re doing, but we do need to know kind of a general idea, or if you’re going to buy a computer or you’re going to buy a printer or paper or something like that, just because there are things that they do sell that we aren’t able to reimburse for. And then we were just there was too many issues with that and having to go back to families after they’d been to the store and all of that, so it’s just easier this way. It takes a couple seconds at the beginning, but it’s not too bad. And then with Staples also because they have multiple stores, we have an account with every Staples across the province, so we need to know which Staples location also you’re wanting that purchase order for. Obviously, if you’re in a small community and they only have one, you can just give us, you know, “Staples in X town,” but if you’re in a larger center and they have multiple Staples locations, like you’re in Calgary or whatever, and you need to you need to tell us exactly which Staples location you’re going to because it goes specifically to that store for that manager to to help us out with. So like I say, Staples are just the ones that are a little bit different. The other vendors, there’s only one vendor location, so we don’t need to worry about all of that fun stuff.

But yeah, so it’s pretty easy. Send us an email to [email protected] with your name, the vendor name, and the amount that you want the PO for, and we can get that done up for you. I just say give us a few days to kind of get that processed because we have to do up the PO and get it sent to the vendor because we don’t want you to show up there and they don’t have the PO yet ready for you. And then yeah, we start doing them in the fall. Now, just a brief rundown on how the POs work. You send us the request, that funding comes out of your account, then you go to the store and spend the money, the vendor sends us the invoice, and then we pay that. So that process does take a few weeks to get through all of it once we’ve received that invoice. So if you, you know, say you get a request for a $500 PO to Staples, you go in there and you only spend $400, that $100 is definitely going back into your account, but it can’t go back until all of those other steps are done. So we have to wait for Staples to send us the invoice, it has to get paid and processed and all of that before that funding goes back into your account, so it doesn’t happen immediately. Just so that you’re aware of that because I know sometimes, you know, then you’ll want to use a PO somewhere else, but unfortunately, those funds are already allocated still for Staples, so it does take there’s a bit of a delay there. But we do try and get that done as quickly as possible, but just so that you know.

The other thing with the POs is if you go say to Staples and you have a $500 PO and whatever you’re purchasing, you’re like, “Oh, it’s $550,” not a problem, you just pay the balance and it’s not a problem. You don’t have to, Staples, like all of our vendors are are totally okay with that, that that happens all the time. So you don’t have to not use that purchase order that day, that’s not a problem. Yeah, so that’s kind of the brief rundown of how to get a purchase order and how they work. If you have any questions or concerns or anything when you’re getting a PO or after you’ve used one, you can always give us a call at the office or you can email us again at [email protected], and we would be happy to answer your questions. Thanks, have a great day.