Purchase orders, receiving, and the gap in between
Why booking stock in against the order you raised is what stops a short delivery quietly becoming your problem — and your loss.
You order forty screens. A box turns up. Somebody opens it, puts the screens on the shelf, and gets back to the counter.
Six weeks later the supplier's statement says you owe for forty. You are fairly sure there were thirty-six. Nobody counted, the box is long gone, and the conversation you are about to have is one you cannot win.
The gap
The order is a record. The bill is a record. The bit in the middle — what actually arrived — usually is not.
That gap is where money leaves a repair shop quietly:
- A short delivery nobody noticed, paid for in full
- A price on the invoice that is not the price you agreed
- Two boxes booked in once, or one box booked in twice
- A part on the shelf that no order accounts for
- A credit you were promised that never arrived and nobody chased
None of these are dramatic. Each is £30 or £60. It is the fact that they are invisible that makes them add up.
Receiving is the control, not the admin
The fix is not a better filing system. It is that goods get booked in against the order that created them, at the moment they arrive.
That single act does several things at once. It tells you what was actually delivered, as opposed to what was ordered. It leaves a partial receipt open rather than closed, so a short delivery stays visible instead of being forgotten. It gives the eventual supplier bill something to be checked against. And it puts the stock on the shelf and in the system in the same movement, so the count does not depend on somebody remembering to adjust it afterwards.
The order stops being a piece of paper you raised and becomes something with a state: sent, partly received, received, billed.
Partial deliveries are normal
The most useful thing a receiving process can do is treat a partial delivery as an ordinary event rather than an exception.
Suppliers back-order. Boxes get split. If your process only has "received" and "not received", a delivery of thirty-six against an order of forty has nowhere to go — so it gets marked received, and the four vanish. Recording thirty-six against a forty-line order leaves four outstanding, and outstanding things can be chased.
Then the bill has something to argue with
When the invoice arrives, the question is no longer "does this look about right?" It is whether this bill matches what we received, at the price we agreed.
That is a question with an answer, and it is the difference between checking a supplier statement and accepting one.
What it costs to do properly
Ordering is a two-minute job. Receiving is a two-minute job. Neither is hard; both get skipped on a busy Saturday, and the cost of skipping them does not show up until the statement lands.
The practical test for any shop: if a delivery arrived short this morning, would anyone know by Friday? If the honest answer is no, the gap is open.
How purchase orders and receiving work in SlickCell Pro is on Purchase orders & receiving. Everything above works against your own supplier records, whether or not the supplier uses SlickCell Pro. When they do, the order stops being an email — Supplier network.