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📬 Xero Feature Request: Send Attachments with Purchase Orders
Title:
Enable the Option to Send Attachments with Purchase Orders (POs) via Email

Description:
Our company — like many in the promotional products, printing, and manufacturing industries — relies heavily on attaching artwork, proofs, logos, and other visual assets to purchase orders. While Xero allows us to upload attachments to POs internally, those files are not included when emailing the PO to a vendor. This is a critical missing piece of functionality.

Why this is critical:
We are a distributor in the ASI (Advertising Specialty Institute) and PPAI (Promotional Products Association International) networks.

In our industry, 90% of POs require artwork or proofs to accompany the order for vendor production.

Sending the PO without the attached artwork results in:

Production delays

Miscommunication with vendors

A completely broken workflow for both our team and suppliers

The ask:
Please implement the same functionality that already exists for invoices:

Allow attachments on Purchase Orders to be included in the email when sending.

Include a simple checkbox like “Include attachments” in the PO email interface.

Ideally, allow a default setting in preferences to always include attachments when sending POs.

Why this is not a major lift:
This functionality already exists and works perfectly for invoices and bills in Xero.

PO file attachments are already stored and managed within Xero — it’s only a matter of including them in the outgoing email logic.

Who this helps:
Thousands of distributors, fabricators, and resellers in ASI, PPAI, SAGE, and similar ecosystems.

Any business that relies on custom production and needs to send POs with supporting documents.

Workarounds are inefficient:
Downloading the PO and manually sending it via external email systems defeats the purpose of using Xero as a centralized workflow tool.

Conclusion:
This is a small development effort with significant business impact. We urge Xero to prioritize this feature to better support businesses like ours and ensure your platform scales with the real-world needs of your product-based users.

This is a real shortfall of Xero and is having a real detrimental affect on our workflow. I don't understand how this has not been actioned previously, as you can already add attachments to invoices!

Please get this actioned asap!!

C'mon Xero get your act together and implement being able to email attachments with Purchase Orders.

You should be able to attach your business purchase terms and conditions on your PO's to send to your suppliers so this is an absolute must for Xero to implement. You can attach and send files through quotes and invoices, why not purchase orders???

I find it difficult to understand that this important requirement is not a top priority to rectify the inadequacy of your purchase order to have an attachment included. The purchase order requires additional technical information than what can be included in the text section of a purchase order. When I send a purchase order, I need to attached technical drawings to ensure the recipient supplies the correct revision as shown in the technical drawing or specifications. Please escalate this request to high priority as it has implications for many users of your software.

Last comment from Xero Mar 13, 2023. This is not good enough. I spend at least an hour a week creating emails to attach PO's to and sending via Outlook because the spreadsheet I have already attached in Xero isn't sent. Maybe I should be submitting an invoice for my time spent working round your failure to build this basic feature?

Would be great to attached doc to a purchase order to be emailed like you can with invoices.

Ive been waiting for this since 2016, its such a blooming nuisance having to work around this. Unfortunately I dont ever see something which should be so simple ever being fixed the way things move here.

Surely this can be sorted asap if you can do it with quotes and invoicing.

Can we also have the PO become a bill once it's filled?

This is such a critical missing step. It makes the PO function so onerous for a client when they need to send their supplier an attachment regarding their PO. If they could just attach their files and send it would make the PO email function actually useable for more clients rather than still needing to send out of an email platform.

I've just come to lend my support to this ancient suggestion which is absolutely crucial in the context of modern business. If I cannot explicitly send my supplier the accompanying placard alongside and order, and instead I need to save the PO as PDF, open a new email, place the contents in this email and send it externally, then the point of using this software at all is moot.

Surely, this has been implemented after 10 years! Purchase orders will invariably be created based on a specification or quote/proposal received from a supplier. Why would a business not want to include these crucial documents, which are part of the audit trail or quality system? I find the whole of Xero to be poor compared to other, much more flexible accounting packages like Freeagent.

I send an Excel recital of taxi journeys undertaken for my company to the supplier and I expect a bill from them that exactly matches the recital. I therefore need to attach this file to the purchase order. If this is not possible it makes Xero next to useless for my needs. This is a critical requirement.

I'm sure there is some background work required, however can't see it being too much different to sending an attached document with an invoice?

So to be clear, you want me as a partner/business consultant to recommend software to businesses when this issue has been here for 10 years but has yet to be planned work?

From a technical standpoint, implementing this update would be fairly simple. Xero already has the capability to send invoices with attached documents via email. A programmer could easily adapt the existing code from the invoice email process and apply it to the Purchase Order (PO) email process, with only minor modifications to accommodate PO-specific fields and processes. The core functionality is already there—it’s just a matter of extending it to POs. This should be a straightforward task, requiring minimal effort.

This idea has been here for over a decade. Wow Xero, way to make your customers feel heard and respected.

Kelly M: you said 19 months ago that Purchase Orders needs an update before this can happen. When is this happening?

The number of similar comments below speaks for itself. Quite unnerving.

This feels like a pretty basic feature. We would benefit from it.

Having the ability to attach a document to a PO is extremley crucial in my job and it is becoming extremely time consuming, having to email the PO to myself, download it and create a new email to then send the PO with the attachment I needed to send. It is very painful. When I know it could be a simple step in xero. Please implement this step as soon as possible. You could literally save me hours of work a week. (I timed it, so I knew how much extra time I am spending having to do this extra step) I don't have that time to spare. Thanks