Import Purchase Orders into QuickBooks Online & Desktop

Quick Answer: In QuickBooks Online, Intuit's import FAQ lists purchase orders among the transactions you can bring in from a spreadsheet, and Advanced or Accountant users also get a Purchase Order template in Spreadsheet Sync. In QuickBooks Desktop, purchase orders come in through an IIF file (File > Utilities > Import > IIF Files). Sales orders are not on any Intuit import list we read, so they need an app or manual entry.

Purchase orders are easy to import once you know which tool your edition offers, and they carry less risk than most imports because they never post to your books. A PO is a commitment, not a transaction: nothing hits expenses, inventory, payables or the bank until the goods arrive and you turn the PO into a bill.

Why are purchase orders different from other imports?

Most imports change balances. Purchase orders don't, and that shapes how you test and clean them up.

• No ledger effect. An open PO sits outside the balance sheet and profit and loss. You can import a batch, review it, and delete the mistakes without unwinding any journal.
• They wait for a bill. The accounting event is the bill (or, in Desktop, the item receipt) that follows. That is when the cost, the payable and any inventory quantity change.
• They never reach the bank statement. Only the eventual bill payment does. If you are reconciling and looking for a PO, you are looking in the wrong place.

Because a bad PO import only clutters your open purchase orders list, you can afford to test with real data. A bad bill import, by contrast, has to be reversed one transaction at a time.

Your options by edition

Importing purchase orders into QuickBooks Online

Intuit's common questions about importing data (read on 27 October 2026) puts Purchase Orders in the list of transactions you can import "in any order", after the lists. For POs, the lists that matter are vendors and products and services, since every PO line needs a vendor and an item or category that already exist.

Steps that apply to any spreadsheet import, from the same FAQ:

1. Import or create the vendors and items first.
2. Save the PO data as CSV, Google Sheets, or XLS/XLSX.
3. Keep the file under 1,000 rows; split larger ones.
4. Run the import, review the mapping, then open two or three of the imported POs and compare them with the source.

Give each row a PO number, vendor, PO date, item or account, quantity, rate and amount, and repeat the PO number on every line of a multi-line order so QuickBooks groups them into one document. Leave the expected ship date and memo in if your file has them; they help whoever receives the goods.

Which purchase orders are worth importing?

Only the open ones, in most cases. When you move from another system, fully received and billed POs have done their job; their history lives in the old system's reports and in the bills you import. Bringing them across creates hundreds of POs you then have to close by hand. Filter the export to orders with quantities still outstanding, import those, and keep a PDF or spreadsheet archive of the rest for audit questions. Partially received orders need care: import only the remaining quantity, and note the original PO number in the memo so the vendor's next invoice can be traced back.

Using Spreadsheet Sync on Advanced

On QuickBooks Online Advanced or Accountant, Intuit's Spreadsheet Sync article lists a Purchase Order template that will "add, edit, or delete purchase orders." The flow runs from the Spreadsheet Sync panel: Create or edit records, pick the company and the record type, optionally download existing records, Get Template, fill the rows, set Post? to Yes on each one, then Sync to QuickBooks.

The edit ability is the main reason to prefer it. A buyer who revises quantities on twenty open POs can pull them down, change the numbers and push them back, which the one-way import can't do.

Importing purchase orders into QuickBooks Desktop

Desktop's route is IIF. Intuit's article on exporting, importing and editing IIF files lists purchase orders among the transactions an IIF file can import, alongside invoices, bills, checks and journal entries. On Windows the path is File > Utilities > Import > IIF Files, signed in as admin in single-user mode; on Mac it is File > Import > From IIF Files.

Three cautions from Intuit's pages:

• "Back up your company file before you import IIF files."
• Imported transactions aren't linked, so nothing ties an imported PO to the bill that later fills it until you do that in QuickBooks.
• Intuit doesn't offer technical support for creating IIF files; if a third-party app produced the file, its vendor supports it.

In QuickBooks 2019 and later, the improved IIF import reports how many lists and transactions came in, and writes the failed rows to a new IIF file with ERROR notes so you can fix and reimport only those. Our guide to converting an Excel file to IIF for QuickBooks covers building the file itself, including the header rows and the tab-delimited layout.

Can you import sales orders?

Sales orders are a QuickBooks Desktop feature for taking customer orders before you invoice, and they are the hard case. The IIF article's list of importable transactions includes estimates and invoices but not sales orders, and neither the Online import FAQ nor the Spreadsheet Sync templates mention them. If you have a backlog to move:

• Check whether your third-party importer lists sales orders among its supported types before you buy it. Our Transaction Pro Importer review shows what to look for in such a tool's documentation.
• If the orders will be invoiced soon, consider importing them as estimates or invoices instead, and convert them in QuickBooks.
• For a handful, entering them through the sales order form is quicker than building an import.

After the import: PO to bill to bank

The PO's job ends when the vendor's invoice arrives. In both editions you create the bill from the open PO rather than typing a fresh bill, so the PO closes and quantities carry over. In Desktop, if goods arrived before the invoice, you may have an item receipt instead; Intuit's article on entering bills against inventory gives the path: Enter Bills against Inventory on the Home page, pick the vendor and the item receipt, and select OK to convert it into a bill.

From there the trail runs the usual way. You pay the bill, the payment shows on the bank or card statement, and you match it. If you are bringing old supplier payments into QuickBooks from statement PDFs, QuickBankConvert turns those statements into CSV, Excel or QBO rows you can import; the QuickBooks integration page lists the formats. The POs themselves never need that step, since they never touch the bank.

If you are importing the bills at the same time, our guide to importing expenses into QuickBooks explains how bill and expense imports differ.

Related guides

• Convert an Excel file to IIF for QuickBooks
• Transaction Pro Importer review
• Import expenses into QuickBooks
• QuickBooks integration and file formats