How to Track Purchase Order History in Vendor Central

New POs generally land on Mondays, so the usual habit is to open the purchase order screen once a week, confirm what arrived, and close the tab. The orders from three weeks ago don't get looked at again until a chargeback or a short forecast sends someone back to find out what was ordered and what you answered. By then the question is "why is our backorder rate up," and you're asking it of a screen that was built for confirming this week's orders.

The fix is to treat Orders, then Purchase Orders as a working list you pull on a schedule. Filter it to the window you're auditing, export it, and file each export the same way, so your answers to Amazon's orders build into a trend line you can read week by week instead of reconstructing it after a chargeback.

This guide covers the list itself. For how Amazon generates a PO and the confirm, ship, and notify steps that follow, see Amazon Inventory Management on Vendor Central.

Where the PO List Lives

Orders, then Purchase Orders is where you can find all of the purchase orders Amazon has made for the products you sell, including the details of POs you already confirmed and the order history. Two parts of that section matter here.

• Action Items, then Confirm New POs is the queue of orders waiting on your answer. It's the part of the screen most teams know, and it only shows what is new.
• Manage POs is the tab that holds the full list and the export, so it's the one you'll use for everything below.

Two related numbers live elsewhere. Open Purchase Order Quantity, the count of confirmed units Amazon has not yet received, sits under Reports, then Retail Analytics, then Inventory. Your answers to the orders roll up on the Operational Metrics report as "Accepted confirmation rate" and "Backorder confirmation rate." The Purchase Order (PO) glossary entry covers both.

Menu labels and tab placement can differ by account and region, so if your console reads differently, go by the section name and confirm the path on your own screen before you write it into a process.

If You Came From Seller Central

Seller Central has no equivalent of this list. On the seller side nobody sends you an order to answer, because you decided what to ship in and your inventory questions were about what you sent. In Vendor Central the PO originates on Amazon's side, against Amazon's forecast, and your part is the answer you give it line by line. The two fill-rate metrics below measure those answers. If you're still mapping the rest of your old reporting across, see where your Seller Central reports went.

Filtering the List Before You Pull It

The instinct is to filter the screen down to the status you're worried about, such as the backordered lines, and export that. It's fine for a one-off question, but it quietly breaks a history file, because a status-filtered export records only the POs that held that status on the day you pulled it and next week's pull of the same filter holds a different set. Pull wide instead and do the filtering in the spreadsheet.

1. Open Orders, then Purchase Orders.
2. Go to the Manage POs tab.
3. Select the All tab, so no PO is left out of the pull by its status.
4. Set the date selection to the window you're auditing. For a weekly history file, that's the last full week plus the week before it. The overlap picks up anything updated on recent POs since your last pull, and the history file removes the duplicates later.
5. Leave any other narrowing off, since status and ASIN are both easier to slice once the rows are in a sheet.

If the question in front of you really is narrow, like "which POs did we backorder last week," pull the same wide window and filter the file. That way you answer the narrow question and add a week to the history from the same pull.

Exporting the PO List

With the view set, open the Export menu and choose Export PO to CSV. On a wide window the file may not drop straight into your browser, so if it doesn't appear, look for it in the console's downloads list before you run the export again.

Before you build anything on the file, open it and match its headers to the fields a history file needs. Amazon names its columns its own way and can change them, so go by what each column holds:

• the PO number and the order date,
• the ASIN,
• the quantity Amazon requested on each line,
• your confirmed answer on each line.

Write the header names you matched into a short key in the same folder, and check each new export against that key before you file it so a renamed column is caught on the day it changes. The general export mechanics, like the downloads list and why two pulls of the same view can disagree, are covered in how to export Vendor Central reports.

Reading the Export Against Your Fill Rates

Your PO answers feed two metrics.

• Fill Rate - Accepted Rate is the percentage of items confirmed as accepted during PO confirmation. On the Operational Metrics report it's "Accepted confirmation rate."
• Fill Rate - Backordered Rate is the percentage of quantity confirmed as back ordered during PO confirmation. On the Operational Metrics report it's "Backorder confirmation rate."

The two definitions are worded differently: Accepted Rate is stated in items and Backordered Rate in quantity. If a rate you rebuild from your export disagrees with Operational Metrics, compute it both ways, by line and by unit, before you conclude the export is wrong.

Operational Metrics tells you the rate moved, and your export shows which POs moved it. When Backordered Rate climbs, sort the week's rows by backordered units and the ASINs driving it come to the top, which gives production planning a specific list to work from.

Read a rising Backordered Rate next to your PO On-Time Accuracy as well. That chargeback category measures whether confirmed units ship inside the window on the PO, and a supply problem that forces you to backorder some lines can also make the lines you did accept run late.

Building a PO History File

A folder of exports with default download names is hard to trend, because nothing tells you which window each one covers or which is the latest. Four rules turn it into a file you can work from.

1. Same filters every pull. All tab, same window length, same day of the week. Write the settings down once, next to the folder.
2. Name each file for what it holds. For example, po_all_2026-09-13_2026-09-26_pulled-2026-09-28.csv, where the window and the pull date tell you what the file covers without opening it.
3. Stack the pulls into one sheet, one row per PO line per pull, with the pull date added as a column. Because the windows overlap, the same PO line appears in two pulls, so keep the row from the latest pull, matching on PO number and ASIN, and each line carries its most recent answer.
4. Summarize by order week. A pivot on the order date's week, counting lines and summing units for each answer, gives you Accepted Rate and Backordered Rate per week. Add ASIN as a second level when you need to see which products moved the rate.

After a couple of months, the sheet can answer questions the PO screen can't, like whether a backorder problem is one ASIN or the whole catalog, and whether it began before or after a supplier change. To line PO answers up against sales and inventory by ASIN, combining Vendor Central reports by ASIN walks through the join.

What Vendor Central Will Not Give You

The PO screen gets you this week's orders and a file of whatever window you asked for. Three things are left to you.

• A trend. Neither the PO list nor the export carries your accepted or backordered rate over time, so every week of history is a pull you made and filed.
• The product-level breakout. The PO screen doesn't break your answers out by product, and which ASINs moved the rates comes only from your own rows.
• The weekly repeat. Each pull, rename, and dedupe is a manual step you repeat every week for as long as you want the history.

InsightLeap does that step continuously. It shows product-level Vendor Central PO data alongside sales and inventory, and keeps historic Vendor Central reports beyond what Amazon's own interface lets you see, so the history file above exists without anyone rebuilding it by hand. The features page covers what it includes.

Where to Start This Week

Go to Orders, then Purchase Orders, then Manage POs. Select All, set the date selection to the last two full weeks, and Export PO to CSV. Name the file with its window and pull date, note the column headers in a key, and pivot backordered units by ASIN. Then put the same pull on the calendar for next Monday after confirmations, and start the history file with this week's rows.