Procurement Insights

Supplier fraud starts with a bill, not at the bank. Whoever enters or last edits a supplier bill can no longer approve it — the rule the payment run already had — and a one-person finance team is not locked out.

A service on a purchase order is now received by a delivery confirmation, not a check-in. Nothing enters stock, the cost is booked when the work is confirmed, and the people who sign for goods sign for work.

A delivery confirmation counts as received in the three-way match, so an order is not ready to pay while a service on it is unconfirmed, and paying past the match needs its own permission and a reason.

Awarding a supplier quote moves a stock item's selling price with its cost. For a resold service, the cost moves and the price stays where you set it, with the markup recalculated so it stays true.

A request for quotation has two routes to the quotes that came back. One is live. The other belongs to an earlier design that was replaced, never removed, and returns an empty list for every request that has ever existed — which is worse than a route that fails.

Collecting from a customer and paying a supplier use the same provider account and are not the same capability. The outgoing side needs credentials the incoming side never asks for, and an organisation configured to collect is not yet configured to pay.

A supplier signed into your portal can mark your purchase order closed. There are four conditions on it, and the fourth — that you have already paid in full — is what makes the whole thing safe.

Between five to nine and a quarter past, five reminder sweeps run — approvals, customers, supplier responses, late deliveries and expiring quotations. Each has its own switch, its own clock and, in one case, a check that runs before either.

Several jobs in the purchasing chain exist only to correct things that should not need correcting. They run every five minutes, every hour and every night — and a run that fixed nothing looks exactly like a run that had nothing to fix.

Suppliers apply to you through a public page addressed by your organisation's own slug, with no account and no login. Everything after that — the tracking link, the document requests, the eventual portal account — follows from decisions in that one route.

The invoice reader returns the page as text and three candidate values: a total, a date and a document number. It returns no line items, and everything it does return is a suggestion. Knowing exactly that is what makes it useful.

Receiving happens a delivery at a time, so an order can be half in. There is no half-in status, and that was a decision — the fact is already answerable from the receipts, and a fourth state would have to be chased through every place the third one is named.