Batch Printing allows you to print two or more purchase orders at a time.  For instance, let's say you've just entered a dozen purchase orders and you're ready to print them.  Instead of printing each one separately, you can use Batch Printing to print all of them.

Batch Printing is reached from the Main Purchase Order Screen by selecting FILE and BATCH PRINTING from the Menu Bar. The Batch Printing dialog box appears:

Purchase Order Batch Printing

After selecting FILE and BATCH PRINTING, the Purchase Order Batch Printing dialog box appears.  On the dialog box will be a list of the purchase orders created that day.  If you haven't created any purchase orders that day, then the box will list all of your purchase orders.

You can control how many days worth of purchase orders are listed by making adjustments in the "Display Options" at the bottom of the screen.  To make changes, first select the number of days worth of purchase orders, and then click "Activate." Be sure to click "Activate" after you make a day change.  The screen needs to re-draw itself based on the new setting and clicking "Activate" is AnyPO's signal that you're ready.

From the list of purchase orders, select those you want printed by clicking and placing a checkmark in the "Yes" column.  (Pressing the spacebar also selects a purchase order.)  If you make mistake, you can click again to remove the checkmark.

You can select all of the purchase orders by clicking on "Select All" or remove the checkmarks by clicking on "Deselect All."

When you've made the selections, press OK.  A dialog box will appear and AnyPO will ask if it can do a check of the purchase orders.  During the check, it will make sure you're not missing something important and that all purchase order messages (if any) are the proper length.  If you don't do the check in advance and a problem is found, AnyPO will interrupt the printing process while it's underway and you'll have to make corrections at that time.  It only takes a second to do the check.  Plus, it's much more efficient to take care of problems in advance, so you'll want to select OK and have AnyPO run the check.

Just before the printing process begins, the Print Purchase Order dialog box appears.  This is the same dialog box that comes up every time you print purchase orders.  From this dialog box you can select whether you want packing slips, originals or copies.

The selections you make on the Print Purchase Order dialog box will be applied to all purchase orders in the batch.  In other words, if you select one original and two copies, then your printer will print one original and two copies for each purchase order in the batch.

Stopping the Batch Printing Process

If you need to stop a batch printing job, tap the <ESC> key three or four times in succession.  A message will appear telling you that the process has been canceled.

Printing, however, will not stop immediately.  Like any printing process, the pages are sent first to the Windows Print Manager where they are placed in a queue. Then, from the Print Manager, they go to your printer.

Once you press <ESC> it may take a while for the Print Manager to clear out all pages being held in the queue.  If desired, you can manually clear out any remaining pages by bringing up the Print Manager (click on the Print Manager Icon in the lower right side of the Windows Screen), and canceling any remaining pages.