Optimizeprocurement

What a badly tracked supplier order really costs

The four most common leaks

• The silent price increase — a price creeping up a few percent between two deliveries triggers no alert. Repeated across a catalogue of several hundred lines, that is a margin point disappearing with nobody deciding to give it away.
• The unclaimed short delivery — a missing case or an underweight item takes minutes to settle if caught at goods-in. A week later nobody can attest to it and the credit is never asked for.
• The duplicate order — two people order the same line for the same service. It arrives twice, usually perishable, and ends up as waste.
• The supplier you cannot challenge — without consolidated volume history per line, an annual negotiation runs on gut feel. The supplier, meanwhile, knows their numbers.

Purchasing is the largest cost centre in a food business and the least equipped. Orders go out by phone, text or email, price lists live in PDFs received in January, delivery notes pile up by the loading bay, and discrepancies surface when someone finally reconciles the invoice — if anyone does.

The cost of working this way is not the time spent, it is what stays invisible: price increases accepted unknowingly, short deliveries never credited back, duplicate weekend orders, and no serious negotiating position because nobody knows how much is actually bought from each supplier.

Centralising catalogues and prices

What centralising unlocks

• Price history per reference — every change is dated. You see who raised prices, by how much and since when, which turns a negotiation into a factual conversation.
• Multi-supplier comparison — same product, same unit, several sources. The decision is made on the real cost per kilo, not on the headline pack price.
• Automatic cost pass-through — an ingredient increase flows straight into the cost of the affected dishes and therefore into the margin on every sale.
• A shared catalogue across sites — a central purchasing unit references once, the sites order from it. See multi-site management.

It starts with the supplier catalogue: references, pack sizes, prices and purchase units in one place, kept current. That base is what lets you compare two offers on the same unit, spot a price change, and push purchase costs automatically into the recipes that use them.

Comparing means bringing everyone onto the same unit. One supplier bills a case of 6 × 800 g, another bills per kilo: without conversion the two prices are not comparable and the cheaper one is not the one you think. Unit conversion is defined once, on the reference, then applied everywhere.

From order to delivery, without re-keying

Goods-in checks, in practice

Reconciling the invoice, the check that pays for itself

• Tie batches to receipts — this is what makes upstream traceability possible during an inspection or a product recall, covered in hygiene and traceability management.
• Update stock on validation — a validated receipt enters stock at quantities actually received, not quantities ordered. That nuance is what makes theoretical stock credible.
• Price variance — invoice against the price in force when the order was placed. The most frequent variance and the most painless to pay, therefore the most profitable to check.
• Quantity variance — invoice against the validated receipt. Being billed for the quantity ordered rather than the quantity delivered is not rare, and without a traced receipt it is invisible.
• Lines that were never ordered — a product invoiced that was neither ordered nor received. Rare, but expensive when it slips through.
• Check against the purchase order — not against the supplier's delivery note. That is the difference between verifying what arrived and verifying what you asked for.
• Record discrepancies while unloading — temperature, weight, quantity, breakage. An issue logged at the bay is claimable; the same issue noticed the next day is not.

An order should be built from requirements, not from habit. Requirements come from three sources feeding the same basket: stock below its threshold, production scheduled for the coming days, and forecast sales. The suggested replenishment is therefore calculated, not guessed.

The order then goes out to the supplier by email from the tool, in their usual format. On delivery the purchase order is the reference: you check what arrives, record discrepancies in quantity, weight or price, and those discrepancies become usable evidence — to claim a credit, and to put numbers on a supplier's reliability over time.

Three-way matching — order, receipt, invoice — is the control that repays the effort of structuring purchasing fastest. It answers a simple question almost nobody can settle without a tool: are we paying the agreed price, for the quantity actually received?

Invoices can be analysed automatically from the PDF or file received, which removes line-by-line re-keying and makes the check systematic rather than exceptional. A check performed only when you already suspect something protects you only from what you suspected.

Frequently asked questions about purchasing

Do suppliers have to use the tool?

How do we load a catalogue with thousands of lines?

Can we order for several sites at once?

What if the invoiced price differs from the ordered price?

How do we measure supplier reliability?

Where do we start when everything is on paper?

What about purchases outside referenced suppliers?

Through the discrepancies accumulated at goods-in: complete-line rate, delays, temperature anomalies, price gaps. These indicators build themselves as soon as receipts are checked, and they change the nature of a negotiation — you stop debating an impression and start discussing figures the supplier can verify on their side.

With the three suppliers representing the largest purchase volume, not the easiest ones. Their catalogue imported and their deliveries checked usually covers most of the spend, and the first discrepancies found fund the rest of the rollout.

Emergency cash-and-carry runs can still be recorded as receipts without a prior order. They enter stock and weigh on food cost like everything else — ignoring them would distort the very indicator you are trying to make trustworthy.

No. They receive orders in their usual format, by email. Nothing is asked of them, which is the condition for a rollout that does not depend on their goodwill.

By importing the supplier's price file. Later updates follow the same path, and price differences against the previous version are flagged — often the first time a business sees the real scale of its price revisions.

Yes. Each site's requirements are consolidated into a single order, delivered in one drop or split by site depending on the logistics. This is how a central kitchen operates.

The gap is flagged at reconciliation. It is the most common and most silent leak: the purchase order price is not the invoice price, and without a systematic check the difference is simply paid.