Purchase orders: the discipline that pays for a POS on its own

Most small shops order by phone or WhatsApp, receive whatever arrives, and pay whatever is invoiced. Each step is reasonable; together they mean you have no way of knowing whether you received what you paid for.

A purchase order fixes that, and it takes five minutes.

The three documents

The order. What you asked for: products, quantities, agreed prices, expected date.

The receipt. What actually arrived, counted at the door.

The invoice. What the supplier is charging you.

The discipline is calledthree-way matching: all three should agree, and where they do not, you have found something before you paid for it.

What it catches

Short deliveries. Invoiced for 50, delivered 46. Without an order, the first record is what someone typed, and nobody can say what was expected.

Price creep. A supplier raises a unit price without mentioning it. Across dozens of lines this is easy to miss and expensive over a year.

Substitutions. A different brand or size sent instead of what you ordered, and now your catalogue and your shelf disagree.

Damage. Recorded at the door, it is the supplier's problem. Recorded later, it is yours.

Double delivery. The same order delivered twice and invoiced twice.

Any one of these, caught once a month, pays for the software.

How to run it

1. Raise the order in the system. Products, quantities, agreed prices, expected date.
2. Send it to the supplier. A PDF or a message with the order number — the number is what makes the rest possible.
3. Receive against the order at the door. Count. Enter what actually arrived.
4. Record discrepancies immediately. Short, damaged, substituted — all recorded at receipt, not later.
5. Match the invoice against the receipt before paying.

Step 3 is where discipline is won or lost. Receiving in the back office an hour later from a delivery note means you are recording what the note says, not what arrived.

Partial receipts

Real deliveries are partial. An order for 100 arrives as 60 now and 40 next week.

Your system must:

• Receive 60 against the order and leave it open for 40
• Show the outstanding balance
• Let you close the order short when the rest is never coming

An open-orders report — everything ordered and not fully received, with ages — is one of the most useful reports a shop can look at weekly. Anything outstanding for more than the expected lead time needs a call.

Supplier returns

Damaged or wrong goods going back out need the same rigour:

• A return document referencing the original receipt
• Stock removed from inventory
• A credit expected from the supplier, tracked until it arrives

Uncollected supplier credits are money shops routinely lose simply because nobody tracked them.

Which systems have this

Per our August 2026 audit, purchase orders and goods receipt are present inWameed, NCR, Oracle, Rewaa and Odoo, and absent inFoodics, Marn, Revel, Geidea, Sapaad and Hala.

This surprises people, because several systems with excellent inventory have no purchasing layer at all. If you have suppliers — and every shop with stock does — check this specifically rather than assuming it is included.

The reports to watch weekly

1. Open orders older than the expected lead time
2. Receipts with discrepancies, by supplier
3. Price variances between order and invoice
4. Supplier credits outstanding
5. Lead time actual versus expected, by supplier

Number 5 feeds back into your reorder points. A supplier who says two weeks and delivers in three needs a reorder point set for three.

Wameed includes purchase orders, goods receipt, partial receipts and supplier returns; see theinventory feature.