Free Arabic purchase order generator — أمر شراء as a PDF

Purchase order or purchase requisition? The distinction the big references get wrong

A purchase order (أمر شراء) is an external document: the buyer issues it and sends it to the supplier to execute the purchase. A purchase requisition (طلب شراء) is internal — an employee or department asking for approval before the purchase happens at all. It never leaves the building and often carries no prices.

Confusing the two is the most common terminology error in Arabic business writing, and it is committed by the most authoritative-looking source in the results: Harvard Business Review Arabic heads its glossary entry «طلب شراء (Purchase Order)», giving the external document the internal document’s Arabic name.

As for أمر توريد, Daftra says it is another name for the same document and publishes its own template under that title. Other sources use it for a warehouse delivery document instead. The sources genuinely disagree, and we do not decide between them.

A purchase order is not a tax invoice — and here is the proof

In the Saudi e-invoicing rules a purchase order does not appear as a document at all. ZATCA’s E-Invoicing Implementation Resolution mentions it only in Annex 2, under the heading «مراجع الطلب», as field 6.1 «رقم أمر الشراء»: conditions «لا يوجد», appearance on the invoice «غير مطلوب», obligation level «اختياري» — optional.

So the purchase order enters the e-invoicing perimeter only as an optional reference number on somebody else’s invoice — the supplier’s — and carries no field of its own. That is why this tool prints no QR code on a purchase order and never titles it «فاتورة»: the QR is a field of the tax invoice, and the title «فاتورة ضريبية» is itself a mandatory regulated field of one.

• No QR code on a purchase order
• Never titled «فاتورة» or «فاتورة ضريبية»
• Not a collection document
• The supplier issues the tax invoice afterwards, for the same lines

Number it: the one field that actually has consequences

Nothing in Saudi law imposes any field, form or numbering on a purchase order between two private companies. The Government Tenders and Procurement Law and its Implementing Regulation address government entities only, and the e-invoicing rules never reach this document.

Numbering is the practical exception. Because «رقم أمر الشراء» is a field ZATCA recognises on the tax invoice, an unnumbered purchase order is one the supplier cannot cite on their invoice — and one you cannot match against the invoice and the goods-received note. That is why the number is required by default here and generated serially.

The VAT on a purchase order is an estimate, not a charge

A purchase order comes before the supply, so the amount on it is what the buyer expects to be invoiced, not tax anyone is collecting. The price basis still matters more here than on a quotation, because it is the buyer who is bound by how it reads.

ZATCA’s General VAT Guide treats a price stated without reference to VAT as VAT-inclusive. Silence about VAT on your purchase order is therefore read against you, which is why an explicit sentence about the price basis prints under the items.

A note on government procurement: «التعميد» is something else

This tool is for the private sector. It has no connection to any government procurement platform and feeds nothing into one. Still, one distinction is worth stating: in the Government Tenders and Procurement Law the binding instrument is called التعميد, and Article 53 of the Implementing Regulation places it beside a contract — «أي عقد أو تعميد نشأ خلال مدة سريانها».

Purchase orders appear across the whole statute and regulation exactly once, in Article 51 of the Regulation, as something government entities may issue under a framework agreement. So the popular equation «تعميد = أمر شراء» is backwards: التعميد is the binding act, the purchase order is the document that implements it — and all of that is within government procurement only.

And why your Gulf colleagues call it an LPO

Work in the UAE, Oman or Qatar and you will hear "LPO" far more often than "purchase order". It stands for Local Purchase Order, and in practice it refers to the same document issued to a supplier inside the country.

There is no substantive documentary difference between the two. The fields are identical — a sequential number, a date, supplier details, lines with quantities and unit prices, a total, and delivery and payment terms. What differs is the everyday name, not the document.

That matters in two places: when a UAE supplier asks you for "the LPO" they are asking for exactly this document, and when you search for an English template, LPO is the term that returns Gulf results while PO does not.

What this adds over the circulating templates

The most widely circulated Arabic purchase-order template is a literal translation of the old US office template — you can tell because it still has a fax field, and because «الشحن عبر» is a word-for-word rendering of "Ship Via". Neither is carried here.

Nor is a validity period. «صالح حتى» is a quotation field: the quotation is the offer that expires, and the purchase order is the acceptance. Not one purchase-order source we reached carries a validity field.

• The total written out in Arabic words, automatically
• A unit-of-measure column per line
• The Hijri date beside the Gregorian one
• An explicit statement of the VAT price basis
• Every label printed in Arabic and English together when you need it
• Serial numbering from a pattern you choose