What is a purchase requisition in SAP?

When a company needs to buy something — material, spare parts, a service — the journey in SAP almost always starts in the same place: with a purchase requisition. It’s one of those terms every SAP user in a procurement context hears sooner or later. This article explains, in plain language, what’s behind it.

In short: an internal request to buy something

A purchase requisition is an internal document. With it, a department is essentially saying: “We need this material or service — please take care of procuring it.” So it points inward, to the purchasing team, and not yet outward to a supplier.

That’s the most important distinction, and the one people mix up at the start:

• The purchase requisition is the internal request (“we’d like to have”).
• The purchase order is the binding document that goes to the supplier (“we hereby order”).

The purchase requisition is therefore the first step in the procurement chain, and not yet a contract with anyone.

How a purchase requisition is created

There are two typical ways a purchase requisition comes into being in SAP.

1. Created manually. Someone in a specialist department — say maintenance or the warehouse — enters the request themselves: what’s needed, how much, for which plant and by when. This is the classic case when someone knows concretely that something has to be bought.

2. Created automatically. Often SAP creates the purchase requisition itself, without anyone typing it. This typically happens through material requirements planning (MRP): when the stock of a material drops below a defined point, the system recognises the demand and automatically proposes procurement — in the form of a purchase requisition. Other processes, such as a maintenance order, can also trigger a requisition automatically.

In both cases the result is the same: an internal document telling purchasing that something is needed.

From demand to purchase order

Once the purchase requisition exists, purchasing takes over. Simplified, it goes like this:

1. Review the request. Purchasing looks at the open purchase requisitions.
2. Find a source of supply. Who should it be bought from? Sometimes this is already stored (for example via an info record or a contract), sometimes purchasing actively selects the supplier.
3. Convert it into a purchase order. The purchase requisition is turned into an actual purchase order. Only this order goes to the supplier.

The data from the requisition — material, quantity, plant, date — is carried over into the purchase order. The purchase requisition is kept as a document and linked to the purchase order, so it stays traceable where the demand originally came from.

The release: why a requisition can “get stuck”

In many companies, not every purchase requisition can become a purchase order right away. Above certain value limits, or for certain material groups, it first has to be released — that’s an internal approval, often by a manager or the person responsible for the cost centre.

For the user this means: if a requisition “does nothing” and never turns into a purchase order, it’s often because the release is still pending. That’s not a fault — it’s a deliberate control step.

Who works with it day to day

• Specialist departments (warehouse, maintenance, production) trigger demand and create requisitions.
• Purchasing converts them into purchase orders and selects suppliers.
• Approvers release requisitions above certain limits.

For you as a user, the purchase requisition is often the point where you come into contact with the procurement process — whether because you create one yourself, or because you want to know why a purchase order hasn’t gone out yet.

Common pitfalls

• Confusing requisition with order. The requisition is internal; the order goes outward. If you’re asking a supplier why “the order” hasn’t arrived, first check whether a purchase order even exists yet — or whether it’s still stuck at the requisition stage.
• Overlooking a missing release. A requisition that hasn’t been released won’t be processed further. A glance at the release status saves a lot of searching.
• Incomplete details. If the delivery date is missing or the quantity is unclear, purchasing can’t process the requisition cleanly.

In a nutshell

The purchase requisition is the internal starting point of every procurement in SAP: a request to purchasing to source something. It can be created by hand or automatically, goes through a release when needed, and is finally converted into a purchase order that goes to the supplier. Once you’ve internalised that one distinction — requesting internally versus ordering externally — you already understand half of what getting started in SAP procurement is about.