Do I have to link my purchase orders to bills or cheques?

Welcome to Community nikkitoews-gmail!

With QuickBooks Online, you can accept and add purchase orders to your transactions effortlessly.  

When your supplier accepts a purchase order and provides the products, it's essential that you add the purchase order to your bill or expense.  This ensures the original purchase order is marked as closed, and is connected to the associated transaction, so your records are accurate and aligned. 

If you have any other questions, please feel free to reach back out.  We would be glad to help!

You don't "have to" but it is highly recommended that you do.  By linking a PO to a bill you will then close the PO and you have the ability to see the two transactions linked should you have questions regarding either of them in the future. You can look back and see how long it took for a supplier to send you the goods you purchased - PO date vs Invoice date for instance.  

When you link the PO to a bill or expense it "closes" the PO (Suppliers section - view the PO bar in blue (left-side of screen) as it captures the value of open POs).  If you don't link the PO to a bill or expense then those PO's are open and will be included in your Open Purchase Order List.  If you don't link the PO then you will need to manually delete them so you aren't expecting them from your supplier.