Purchase Order Tracking

How to tie work to client purchase orders using Time Allocations — budget pools with a PO number, a live remaining balance, and low-balance warnings.

When a client funds work through a purchase order, you'll want every logged hour traceable to that PO — and a warning before the budget runs out. In Hire2Hero this is handled by Time Allocations: budget pools created on the client corporation, each carrying a PO Number, a Maximum Amount, and a live Current Balance that burns down as invoices are finalized.

You won't find a page called "Purchase Orders" in the product — the feature is labeled Time Allocation throughout the admin portal, and candidates see it as a Project picker on their time entries.

How the pieces connect

Create allocations on the client — each pool has a name, PO number, budget ceiling, dates, and warning thresholds.
Attach allocations to a billing contact — this activates PO tracking for that contact's placements.
Candidates pick a Project on every time block — once a billing contact has allocations attached, the Project field becomes required on time entry, so every hour is stamped with a PO.
Invoices burn the balance down — when an invoice leaves Draft, each line's amount is deducted from its allocation's Current Balance. Returning an invoice to Draft restores the balance.
Warnings fire as the pool runs low — admins with the low-allocation notification permission get an email when a balance crosses its threshold.

Create a Time Allocation

Open the client under Clients → Client Corporation and switch to the Time Allocation tab. (The tab appears only on saved clients, not on the new-client form.)

In Basic Information, enter a Name (this is the label candidates see in the Project picker), the Maximum Amount (budget ceiling), and the PO Number. All three are required.

In Warnings, set either a Low Amount Warning (currency threshold) or a Low Percent Warning (percentage of budget) — the two are mutually exclusive, and if both are filled in the percentage wins and the amount is discarded on save. New allocations are pre-filled with a 10% warning, so clear that field first if you want the pool to warn on a dollar amount instead.

In Schedule, set the Start Date and optionally an End Date. Leaving End Date blank creates an open-ended PO, but note that low-balance warning emails only go out for allocations whose date range covers today — a pool with no End Date is skipped by the warning job entirely, so set one if you want the warnings described below to fire.

Save. The allocation appears in the tab's grid with its Current Balance starting at the maximum amount.

For the full field reference, see Managing Clients — Time Allocation tab.

If the client increases the PO, edit the allocation and raise Maximum Amount — the Current Balance is topped up by the difference, so past spend is preserved.

Attach allocations to a billing contact

Allocations don't do anything until they're attached to a billing contact:

Open the billing contact under Clients → Billing Contact.

In the Time Allocations picker, select one or more of the client's allocations.

Save. From now on, every time block submitted under this contact's placements must be assigned to one of the attached allocations.

The Project field becomes mandatory. Once a billing contact has any allocations attached, candidates cannot save a time block without picking one. Warn your candidates before attaching allocations mid-period, and leave the picker empty for contacts whose work isn't PO-funded.

Track the burn-down

The Time Allocation tab's grid is your burn-down view — compare Current Balance against Maximum Amount per pool.

Key things to know about how the balance moves:

Deduction happens at invoice finalization, not at time entry or timecard approval. Hours sitting in draft invoices haven't hit the balance yet.
Un-finalizing restores the balance. Moving an invoice back to Draft credits its amounts back to the pool.
The balance can't go negative. Finalizing an invoice that would overdraw a PO fails with an error — resolve it by raising the allocation's Maximum Amount (or removing lines) before finalizing again.
Time entry is not blocked by an empty pool. Candidates can still log hours against an exhausted allocation; the stop happens at invoicing. Watch the warnings so it doesn't get that far.

Allocations are viewed per client — open each client corporation's Time Allocation tab to see its pools. There is no cross-client PO list.

Low-balance warnings

When a pool's Current Balance drops below its Low Amount Warning (or the equivalent of its Low Percent Warning), Hire2Hero emails a warning to every administrator who holds the Notification: Time Allocation is low permission.

The check runs on a schedule (roughly every six hours), and repeat warnings for the same pool are suppressed for 48 hours per recipient.
The email includes the client name, the allocation name, and the PO number, with a link that opens the client's Time Allocation tab.
Warnings only fire for active pools — allocations outside their start/end dates are not evaluated, and a pool with no End Date counts as outside the window and is never warned on.

To control who receives these, edit the role or user's permissions — see User Management. The email template itself can be customized like other system emails — see Notifications.

Where the PO shows up downstream

Timecard blocks — each block records which allocation it was logged against (the candidate's Project selection).
Invoice lines — lines carry their allocation, and the allocation's name is folded into the line description.
Custom reports — the allocation name is available as a field on report data sources (the PO number and balance are not reportable). See Reporting.