Alma lacks the functionality for batch adding an Additional PO Line to a group of PO Lines. Because Alma lacks this functionality, a great deal of manual work is required.

Here is the use case: we made a large prepayment (the parent POL), and now we are creating technical orders (the child POLs) for all the items we chose to purchase with that pre-payment. We need each of the child POLs to have the parent POL as its Associated PO Line. We can create the child POLs in a batch using a New Order Import Profile. However, we have no way to batch-assign the Associated PO Line to all the child POLs. The New Order Import Profile does not have an Additional PO Line field, and the PO Line jobs in Alma do not include the ability to add or update an Associated PO Line. So, there is no way to add an Associated PO Line aside from manually editing each individual PO Line. This is a lot of manual work. We suggest this problem should be addressed in two ways:

1) We need to be able to add an Associated PO Line as part of the New Order Import Profile. This should be one of the options in the PO Line Information tab.

2) Associated PO Line should be one of the fields that is updatable in the Update PO Lines Information job. This will ensure we can batch-add an Associated PO Line to PO Lines that are already in Alma.