Yes - purchase order has no impact on financial figures. But it absolutely should impact management figures.
Qty owned is a financial figure. Purchase order won’t change your Qty owned. We both agree on this.
Where we disagree is that you claim that purchase order should not change Qty to receive figure either. But that cannot be possibly right.
In Manager, you can configure Qty Desired figure for your inventory items. This is inventory level you wish to maintain.
If you use this feature, you can calculate Qty to order which is Qty Desired minus Qty on hand plus Qty to deliver minus Qty to receive
Currently, when you create purchase order, it immediately increases your Qty to receive figure which will in turn immediately lower (or clear) your Qty to order figure.
Now if it wouldn’t work this way and purchase order would have no impact on Qty to order figure, what stops you from making duplicate orders to suppliers? Nothing.
So that’s the reason purchase orders need to have an effect on Qty to receive. We cannot wait for invoice from supplier. You lose control over how much you’ve ordered if orders have no impact on your quantities.
If your solution is to enter dummy purchase invoices from suppliers which you haven’t actually received yet. That comes with entirely new bag of problems. In case of value added taxes, you are now at risk of claiming tax credits on expenses you didn’t acrually incur (not even on accrual basis). That’s too dangerous.
I’m aware that current mechanism is forcing people to use Purchase Orders and Sales Orders tabs if they want to track quantity to receive and deliver. And I can see people resist extra data entry, but in my view, I’m forcing users to do the right thing and stopping them from taking shortcuts. Because those shortcuts can hurt them in unexpected ways (e.g. erroneously claiming tax credits on dummy purchase invoices)