# Purchase order

A customer's written order for goods or work, priced, with no long contract.

Revenue that arrives by purchase order re-competes on every order, so a customer list is not a contract book however loyal it looks. The screen is what share of revenue is contracted versus ordered, and how long the ordering relationships have actually run. It is also a word buyers trip on at the worst moment. The [purchase agreement](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/purchase-agreement) that buys the company is a different document entirely, and diligence requests that confuse the two waste a week.

In numbers: A machine shop doing $1.8M a year where 80% arrives as purchase orders from three customers is a concentration screen and a re-compete risk in one number.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/purchase-order
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt