PURCHASE ORDERS
Steering clear from purchase orders because of the overwhelming amount of paperwork? Completely understandable, especially if you’re a small business and just building up your vendor list. However, as you grow you might start noticing purchase order requests and invoicing slowly but surely getting out of control. From straightforward operations to a complex network of vendors each of which has a separate set of invoices and supporting docs. So you start using three-way matching of invoices to purchase orders and packing slips only to realize that the paperwork is getting more out of control.
If purchase order process steps are not taken, or lack detail, brace yourself for problems. Don’t forget that purchase orders are legally binding, i.e. you can’t just refuse to pay once you sent it to the vendor. The takeaway? To keep your customers happy and avoid costly litigation, you need to closely track every purchase order ever made.
Paper-based PO management systems are indeed living out their last days: records are error-prone with duplicate purchase order requests and missing transactions. Imagine you’ve received the invoice with a total of twice more than the amount agreed in a PO. What to do? You start calling your purchasing department trying to make sense of the numbers, but turns out the purchase order request is nowhere to be seen!
Already invested in purchase order software for small business? We bet you still do manual tracking in Excel and purchase order books just in case. Marinate helps you put all purchase transactions on the record without changing your purchase order procedure.
For purchase order best practices, you need a clear audit trail of every purchase order ever made. You need to know for sure who and when approved the purchase order request. Marinate solves that: now you can be sure that the right people signed off on time before making a high-value purchase. Visibility on the entire process will save you time and ensure nothing is missed when invoicing.
Marinate makes electronic purchase orders easy: approve or reject a purchase order request right from your email, SMS, or any other app you’ve been using to communicate with your purchasing department. It tells you who takes what action on the purchase order request near real-time. Purchasing departments will surely appreciate the chronological view of purchase orders by stakeholders and having all the related documents grouped by the vendor in one place. Be sure you’re getting what you ordered by looking at the exact amounts of merchandise, delivery terms, and every other detail of the purchase order.