Organising Procurement: Requests, Approvals and Clean Purchase Orders
An invoice arriving that nobody admits to ordering is the classic symptom of unmanaged procurement.
Three documents, one flow
- A purchase request from the department that needs something: what, how much, what for and when.
- Approval based on value and type of spend.
- A formal purchase order to the supplier, which becomes the reference when goods and invoices arrive.
Skip any of these and reconciliation at the end is always hard.
Sensible approval rules
A threshold set too low has directors approving stationery. Too high removes control. Set two or three levels only, then review after three months using real data: how many requests per month and how long approval takes on average.
Three-way matching
Match the purchase order, the goods receipt and the supplier invoice. Differences must surface before payment, not after. This is the flow that prevents double payments and off-budget buying.
Supplier data worth maintaining
Official name, contacts, payment terms, average lead time and price history. Price history alone often saves more than the system costs.
Connect it to stock and books
A purchase order connected to Zoho Inventory updates incoming stock, and invoices flowing into Zoho Books remove retyping.
Start with the leakiest category
Pick the one spending category with the most problems, fix its flow, then expand. See our automation service.