Three Chases Between Nine and a Quarter Past
Between five to nine and a quarter past, five separate 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 of them.
The purchasing chain has four places where somebody is waiting for somebody else, and each of them gets its own twenty minutes of the morning.
Chasing is the unglamorous half of procurement and it is almost entirely a memory problem. A request waiting for approval, a supplier who has not answered a sourcing request, an order whose delivery date has passed, a quotation about to expire — none of these announce themselves, and all of them are expensive to discover late.
The morning, in order
| Time | What is chased | Who is waiting |
|---|---|---|
| 08:55 | Purchase requests awaiting approval | The person who asked |
| 09:00 | Overdue customer invoices | You, for money |
| 09:05 | Sourcing requests suppliers have not answered | Your buyer |
| 09:10 | Purchase orders past their delivery date | Whoever needs the goods |
| 09:15 | Quotations about to expire | Your buyer, again, and with a deadline |
| 09:20 | The overdue invoice list, to your own staff | Your finance team |
They are separate jobs rather than one because they are separately controllable. An organisation can chase suppliers and not customers, or approvals and nothing else, and each has its own frequency. Bundling them would have made the schedule tidier and the configuration coarser.
Each one asks three questions
-
Is there anything to chase?
A candidate query establishing whether this organisation has anything actionable at all.
-
Is this reminder switched on?
A per-organisation setting for that notification type. Off means the sweep passes over you entirely.
-
Is it due?
A cadence — daily, weekly, monthly or a custom interval — held per organisation and per notification type, with the first run after switching it on always allowed.
The order of the first two matters more than it looks
The supplier response chase asks whether there is anything actionable before it asks about the setting or the clock. That means an organisation with no unanswered sourcing requests does not consume its cadence on an empty pass — so the first genuinely unanswered request the following week is chased immediately rather than waiting out a window that was spent on nothing. It is the same principle as stamping the clock only when something actually goes out, applied one step earlier.
What counts as overdue, precisely
Each chase has to define its own population, and those definitions are worth knowing because they explain the reminders you get and the ones you do not.
A delivery is late unless the order has reached one of eight states
An order past its delivery date is chased unless it has been delivered, completed, paid, procured, checked in, cancelled or rejected. That list is checked by name, and it deliberately includes both spellings of cancelled, because both exist in the data — which is the sort of small accommodation that separates a filter that works from one that quietly chases a cancelled order every morning.
A quotation expires thirty days after it was given, unless it says otherwise
Where a quotation carries no validity period of its own, thirty days is assumed, and the reminder goes out inside a three-day window before that date. Only quotations still genuinely open are considered — those awaiting a decision, and those that have been scored but not yet awarded.
The three-day window is the useful part. A reminder on the day of expiry is a notification of something that has already happened; three days is enough to ask for an extension or make a decision, and short enough that the reminder still feels connected to the deadline.
A reminder on the day is a notification. A reminder three days out is a chance.
Where these fit against the rest
Two distinctions are worth keeping straight when deciding what to switch on.
- Some of these leave the building and some do not. A supplier response chase reaches your supplier; a delivery chase and a quotation expiry chase reach your own people. The ones that leave are worth setting more conservatively, because a supplier chased daily learns to route your address to a folder.
- Each is separate from the digest of the same subject. The overdue invoice reminder to a customer and the overdue invoice list to your finance team are two jobs twenty minutes apart with two settings. Switching off the outbound one leaves your own visibility intact, which is usually what somebody actually wants.
The practical configuration
Suppliers are slow to quote
Supplier response chase, weekly
Daily reads as harassment to a supplier deciding whether to bid at all. Weekly is diligent and leaves room for a call.
Deliveries slip regularly
Delivery chase, daily
This one stays inside your organisation, so frequency costs nothing but attention — and a late delivery is worth attention every day it is late.
Quotations expire before decisions are made
Expiry chase on, and shorten your validity
If quotations routinely expire, the thirty-day default may be longer than your decision cycle needs. A shorter validity concentrates the decision rather than extending the wait.
Approvals are the bottleneck
Approval reminder, daily
The eight fifty-five sweep is the cheapest of the five to leave on, because a request waiting for approval is a process stopped rather than a process slow.
Five questions to ask about automatic chasing
Can each reminder be controlled separately?
A good answer sounds like
Yes, per type.
What ours actually is
Yes — a separate switch and a separate cadence per notification type per organisation.
Does an empty pass consume the cadence?
A good answer sounds like
No.
What ours actually is
No. The supplier chase checks whether anything is actionable before it looks at the clock, and every reminder stamps its clock only when something goes out.
When is a delivery considered late?
A good answer sounds like
A named population.
What ours actually is
Past its delivery date and not in one of eight closed states — delivered, completed, paid, procured, checked in, cancelled or rejected.
How long is a quotation valid?
A good answer sounds like
A default, and an override.
What ours actually is
Thirty days where the quotation says nothing, with the reminder sent inside a three-day window before expiry.
Which of these reach my suppliers?
A good answer sounds like
A clear list.
What ours actually is
The sourcing response chase leaves the building. The delivery and expiry chases are internal.
Our take
Chasing is where procurement software either earns its money or becomes a filing cabinet, and the design decision that matters is granularity rather than sophistication. Five separate sweeps with five separate switches and five separate clocks is more configuration than a single daily digest, and it is worth it, because the right frequency for chasing your own approvers is not the right frequency for chasing a supplier deciding whether to bid. The detail worth copying is the ordering: check whether there is anything to do before checking whether you are due, so a quiet week does not spend a cadence that a busy one needs. Everything here is switched off or on per organisation, which means the most common failure is not the design — it is that nobody has looked at which five are running.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Five separate reminder sweeps in the morning — purchase request approvals, overdue customer invoices, unanswered sourcing requests, overdue deliveries and expiring quotations — plus a staff-facing overdue invoice digest.
- A separate on switch and a separate cadence per notification type per organisation, with daily, weekly, monthly and custom-interval options.
- An actionable check on the supplier response chase that runs before the setting and the clock, so an organisation with nothing to chase does not spend its cadence on an empty pass.
- A cadence stamped only when something actually went out, across every one of these reminders.
- A defined population per chase — eight closed states excluded from the delivery chase, and only genuinely open quotations considered for expiry.
- A thirty-day default validity on a quotation that carries none, with the reminder sent inside a three-day window before expiry.
- One job per organisation per reminder type, queued rather than sent inline, so a slow mail server does not hold up the sweep.
- Every sweep running once across servers and never overlapping itself.
More we can add to your workspace
- An escalation ladder per chase, so a sourcing request unanswered for three weeks reaches somebody different from one unanswered for three days.
- A per-supplier or per-buyer cadence, so a key supplier and an occasional one are chased on different rhythms.
- A record on the document of which reminders were sent and when, visible to whoever picks up the phone next.
- A single morning digest combining all five for organisations that would rather have one email than five sweeps.
- A pause per record, for the order or quotation where a conversation is already under way.
- A configurable reminder window on quotation expiry, rather than a fixed three days.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will keep reminders that leave the building behind a switch and a cadence. A supplier chased every day for an answer learns to filter your address, and the cost of that lands on the next sourcing request rather than this one.
- We will not chase on your behalf beyond email. Escalating to a call, a penalty or a change of supplier is a commercial decision with a relationship attached, and it belongs to a person in your business rather than to a scheduled job.
- What a reminder to a supplier may say, and how insistent it may be, is shaped by your contract with them and by the norms of your market. We will send what you configure; the tone is a decision you own.
A record on each document of which reminders went out and when is the smallest useful piece, and it answers the question every buyer asks before picking up the phone: has anybody already chased this?
From reminders to a chasing policy
The sweeps, the switches and the clocks all exist. What buyers ask for next is escalation and memory — a different message as something ages, and a record of what has already been sent.
Escalation as things age
A different recipient and a different tone at three days, three weeks and three months, rather than the same reminder repeating.
Reminder history on the record
What was sent, to whom and when, on the order or the quotation itself.
A pause per record
Stop chasing the one order where a conversation is already under way, without switching the sweep off for everything else.
We publish scope, not dates.
Scope procurement chasingFind out which five are switched on
Almost every complaint about too many reminders, and every complaint about too few, is answered by the same screen. It takes five minutes and it is the highest-value five minutes in the module.
Talk through procurement remindersFrequently asked questions
Why are these five separate jobs rather than one digest?
Because they are separately controllable. The right frequency for chasing your own approvers is not the right frequency for chasing a supplier who is deciding whether to bid, and one job would force a single answer. A combined morning digest for organisations that want one email is a reasonable request and is named above — but it should be a choice rather than the only shape.
Why did a reminder not go out when something was clearly overdue?
Usually the cadence. Each reminder type holds one clock per organisation, so if a batch went out earlier in the current window, the next batch waits for the window to close. The other common cause is the population: a delivery is only chased if the order is past its date and not in one of eight closed states, so an order marked paid is not chased even if nothing arrived.
How long is a quotation valid?
Thirty days where the quotation itself carries no validity period, and the reminder is sent inside a three-day window before that date. If your quotations routinely expire before a decision is made, the useful adjustment is often a shorter validity rather than a longer one — a deadline that concentrates the decision beats one that extends the wait.
Do these reminders reach my suppliers?
One of them does — the chase for an unanswered sourcing request. The delivery and quotation expiry chases are internal, as is the approval reminder. That distinction is worth keeping in mind when setting frequencies, because the internal ones cost attention and the outbound one costs goodwill.
What does "nothing actionable" mean?
That the organisation has no records in the state this chase exists for — no unanswered sourcing requests, no overdue orders, no quotations near expiry. The supplier chase checks this before it looks at the setting or the clock, which means a quiet week leaves the cadence untouched and the first genuinely unanswered request the following week is chased immediately.
Can I stop chasing one particular order?
Not per record today — the switch is per notification type for the whole organisation. A pause on a single order or quotation, for the case where a conversation is already under way, is on the list above and is what stops an automatic reminder cutting across a negotiation somebody is already having.
