Free Purchase Order Template (Excel)

What's in the purchase order template

The template is a single Purchase Order sheet built as a form: header fields for your company, the vendor, a PO number, and the date, followed by a line-item table for the products or services you're ordering.

Each line captures a description, quantity, and unit price. Below the line items, the sheet totals everything into a subtotal, applies your tax rate and any shipping cost, and shows the final amount due — all standard fields a vendor expects to see on a PO.

Having your company details, a PO number, and the date in a fixed spot at the top also means every PO you send looks consistent, which makes it easier for a vendor to file and reference against their own invoice later.

What calculates automatically

Line totals compute the moment you enter a quantity and unit price — no formulas to write or copy down. The subtotal adds every line automatically, and once you enter your tax rate and shipping cost, the grand total updates instantly.

That means the only manual work is typing the header details and the line items themselves. Everything downstream — line totals, subtotal, tax, shipping, total — stays correct even as you add or edit rows.

If you insert a new line item in the middle of the table, the formulas extend with it, so you're not stuck adding rows only at the bottom or manually dragging a formula down after the fact.

Why this beats a blank spreadsheet

A blank spreadsheet means building the header layout, the line-item table, and the subtotal/tax/shipping/total formulas from scratch, then re-checking them every time a line changes. One typo in a SUM range and your PO total is wrong on a document you're sending to a vendor.

This template already has that structure and math in place, formatted so it prints or exports to PDF cleanly. You fill in numbers, not formulas, and the totals are guaranteed to be right.

Who this purchase order template is for

Small businesses, freelancers, and solo operators who need to formalize an order with a supplier but don't run full purchasing or accounting software are the main fit. If your ordering volume is a handful of purchases a week rather than hundreds a day, a spreadsheet PO is often faster to issue than logging into a system built for enterprise procurement.

It's also useful as a stopgap for companies that are between tools — maybe you've outgrown handwritten POs but aren't ready to commit to a paid purchasing platform. Because the file is just Excel or Google Sheets, anyone on your team can open, fill in, and send a PO without training or a login.

Contractors and trades businesses that order materials per job also use this format well: one PO per job or per vendor order, saved with a consistent naming convention, gives you a simple paper trail for what you ordered and what it cost — useful when reconciling job costs later.