The short answer
An administrator enables PO capture at Business Settings → Business order info → PO Number, optionally marking it required at checkout. The number displays in Business Analytics reports. Field length is 20 characters on the Amazon Corporate Credit Line and 17 characters on a corporate credit card or purchase card.
PO capture is the cheapest control on Amazon Business and one of the least used. It is free, it takes a couple of minutes, and it is the difference between an Amazon line on a card statement that nobody can account for and an order that reconciles cleanly against a requisition.
Turning it on
- Sign in as an account administrator. Enabling PO capture is an administrator action. If you cannot see Business Settings, you do not hold the role that can do this.
- Open Business Settings. From the Your Account menu, go to Business Settings.
- Select Business order info. This is the section that controls the fields buyers see at checkout.
- Enable PO Number. Turn on the PO Number field so it appears during checkout for buyers in scope.
- Decide required or optional. Select required if you want checkout to be blocked until a PO number is entered. Optional leaves it to the buyer, which in practice means it will often be left blank.
- Save the setting. Select Save. The field applies at checkout from that point onward; it does not retroactively add PO numbers to past orders.
- Tell buyers to use the deliver to field. Amazon notes that to ensure the PO number displays on the shipping label, it must be entered in the deliver to field at checkout.
Required or optional: pick required
Amazon lets administrators set PO numbers to required or optional at checkout. There is a strong practical argument for required, and it is not about discipline.
An optional field on a checkout page is a field that gets skipped under time pressure, which is exactly when the orders you most want traceable are placed. A month later, the ten orders missing a PO reference are indistinguishable from personal purchases, and someone in finance spends an afternoon on them.
The counter-argument is real too: required PO capture stalls buyers who do not have a number to hand, which pushes them toward ordering elsewhere. If you have a light-touch purchasing process, consider pairing required PO capture with an approval workflow that catches the exceptions rather than blocking every buyer. See multi-user accounts and approvals.
The character limits, and why they matter
Amazon publishes two, tied to how you pay:
| Payment method | Characters allowed in deliver to |
|---|---|
| Amazon Corporate Credit Line | 20 |
| Corporate credit card or purchase card | 17 |
17 characters is tighter than it sounds. A scheme like PO-2026-FACILITIES-00184 is 24 characters and will not fit. Neither will most schemes that encode a department name in full.
If you are designing a numbering convention now, design it against the shorter limit — something like PO26-FAC-00184 is 14 characters and survives both. If your scheme already exists and is longer, agree an abbreviation rule before your buyers each invent their own.
Where the number actually shows up
Amazon is specific about this, and the distinction matters for anyone expecting paperwork to match:
- Business Analytics reports — Amazon states the PO number displays here. This is the reliable record, and the one your reconciliation should be built on. See Spend Visibility and reporting.
- Shipping label or packing slip — Amazon says the PO number may show up there depending on your carrier, and that to ensure it does, it must be entered in the deliver to field at checkout.
- Third-party seller orders — Amazon notes the number may or may not appear in various locations.
The takeaway for a receiving desk: do not build a goods-in process that depends on the PO being printed on the box. Build it on the report.
PO numbers and invoicing
PO capture becomes considerably more valuable if you use the Business Credit Account, because invoice templates can be set per group with different preferences — Amazon names decentralized accounts payable departments, multiple business locations and different purchase order numbers as exactly the use cases templates exist for.
The reconciliation route Amazon documents is: generate the Business Credit Account report or the Reconciliation report in Business Analytics, filter by transaction date, download as CSV, and match it against your own records. With PO capture on, that match is mechanical. Without it, it is detective work. See invoices and receipts and Pay by Invoice and net terms.
If you need more than this
PO capture is a field. It is not a requisition system. If your process requires the PO to be issued before the order exists, approved against a budget, and matched three ways on receipt, you are describing an e-procurement platform, and the relevant Amazon capability is punchout — where the cart returns to your system and your system creates the PO. See punchout and procurement integration.
For most small and mid-sized organizations, though, the field plus an approval workflow plus a monthly CSV is the whole answer, and it costs nothing.
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Plans and prices verified against Amazon on August 11, 2026. How we check.
