Internal and External Change Orders

Change orders enable all of the affected parties to propose changes to an active purchasing document by indicating their desired changes to the current version of the document. The change order is consider internal or external depending on the document attributes being changed.

A purchasing document is a contractually binding document between a buying organization and a selling organization, and hence it captures contractual terms like products or services to be delivered, delivery schedule and payment terms. Any change proposed to any of these kind of attributes must be communicated to and accepted by both parties before the changes become binding. These attributes are called supplier facing attributes.

In addition to supplier facing attributes, a purchasing document also contains attributes that are required for administrative purposes within the buying organization, such as cost centers or projects that would be funding the purchase, internal delivery instructions, various tolerances and controls to ensure satisfactory order execution. These attributes are called internal control attributes.

A change order that proposes changes to only internal control attributes is an internal change order, all other change orders are external. Change order type on a change order indicates whether the change order is an internal change order or an external change order. Unlike an external change order, an internal change order doesn't get communicated to the supplier and doesn't cause a new revision of the document. Although internal changes don't cause a new revision of the document, history of such changes is maintained in the same manner as external changes and can be accessed from the View Change History page.