Blanket PO Release & Drawdown Tracker

The problem this kills

You set up a blanket PO — a standing agreement with a supplier for, say, $250,000 of a part over the next year — precisely so you don't have to cut a fresh PO every time. Then reality sets in. Releases (call-offs) go out by email, by phone, from a spreadsheet someone forgot to update. Nobody can tell you, on the spot, how much committed value is left or how many days until the agreement expires.

So you over-release: you commit more against the blanket than it was ever worth, and finance finds out at invoice time. Or a release goes out at last year's price because nobody checked the contracted item list. Or the agreement quietly expires and you keep calling off against a dead PO. The recurring spend that was supposed to be the easy, controlled part of your job becomes the part you lose sleep over — and every fix is a phone call to the supplier and an awkward note to your manager.

This is exactly the kind of rules-based, balance-and-date-checking work that a small internal tool does far better than a spreadsheet — and you do not need to be a developer to build it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your blanket agreements. You load your blanket PO headers — supplier, total committed value, valid-from and valid-to dates, and the allowed items with their contracted prices. When a request comes in, you pick the blanket and draft a release: item, quantity, ship-to, need-by date. Before anything commits, the tool checks the three things you'd check by hand — is there enough committed balance left, are we still inside the validity window, and is the price the contracted one for an allowed item?

If a release is clean, the buyer reviews and approves it. If it would breach the remaining balance or fall outside the dates, the tool forces a second approval and makes the breach impossible to miss. On approval the release is committed, given a sequential release number, and the blanket's running balance ticks down. A live burn-down shows how much of each agreement you've drawn down, and the tool emails you when a blanket drops below your chosen percentage remaining or comes within N days of expiry. At the end, you export releases as a clean CSV in the exact columns your ERP expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how your blanket agreements are structured, how releases get requested and numbered today, your item and SKU naming, your committed-value and validity rules, your approval thresholds, and your nastiest edge cases — and then tailors the data model, the balance and price checks, and every later step to your answers. This is a build shaped around how your procurement team actually runs recurring spend, not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the database schema, importing blanket POs and any existing releases (with duplicate guards), the release-drafting screen, the balance / validity / contracted-price engine, the buyer's review-and-approve gate with its breach-triggered second sign-off, the drawdown burn-down and alerts, and the CSV export of releases for your ERP. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. Because the whole thing runs on CSV in and CSV out, you can build and use it this weekend even if you have no direct connection to your purchasing system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Releases commit real money against real agreements, so this is built like it matters: login so only your procurement team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's blankets and releases, and a complete audit trail of every import, draft, check, approval, and export — who did what, and when. Nothing commits automatically: a release is a draft until the buyer approves it, and a release that would breach the committed balance or the validity window cannot be approved on a single click — it requires an explicit second sign-off. Duplicate guards on the blanket PO plus release number mean the same release can't be committed twice, and the tool warns you when an identical release line is submitted again.

Who it's for

Buyers and category managers who run recurring spend on blanket or standing agreements and keep losing track of how much is left and when each deal expires. If you can explain how you decide whether a call-off is allowed, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let it interview you about your agreements.