Purchase orders, goods received notes and the three quantities that matter

Most restaurants buy by phone and remember by habit. It works until the person who does the ordering takes a week off, or until an invoice arrives that nobody can verify.

Purchasing does not need to be bureaucratic. It needs three quantities and one document.

Ordered, received, accepted

These are not the same number, and pretending they are is the root of most stock disputes:

A crate arrives with twelve boxes when you ordered fifteen; two of the twelve are damaged. Ordered 15, received 12, accepted 10. Only the last number should move your stock, and only the middle one should be reconciled against the delivery note. If your system records a single quantity, you will discover the gap when the invoice comes, and by then the rejected boxes are gone.

Rejections also carry a reason and a disposition: returned to the supplier, or written off as a loss. Those are different financial outcomes, and choosing between them at the door is far cheaper than arguing about it at month end.

The purchase order has a life

An order moves through states rather than existing as a note on a pad:

Draft → Submitted → Approved → Partially received → Received, with Cancelled as an exit.

The two useful ones are Approved and Partially received. Approval means someone with the authority to spend money agreed to this amount before it was spent — which is the single cheapest control in procurement. Partially received is the honest state most systems lack: half the order arrived, the rest is still owed, and the PO stays open until it is not.

Each order also carries an expected delivery date against an actual one. After a month, the gap between those two columns tells you which supplier is reliable and which one you have been quietly forgiving.

Goods received notes and why they exist

A goods received note is the record of a specific delivery against a specific order: who received it, when, what arrived, what was accepted, and what was rejected and why.

It is the document that lets you say “the invoice says fifteen, our note says twelve, here is the signature.” Without one, an invoice dispute is your memory against their paperwork, and their paperwork always wins.

The receipt line is also the right place for batch number, lot number, expiry date and manufacture date. Recording them at the door means a recall or a spoilage question can be answered by a query instead of by opening every box on the shelf. A sticker will fall off; a receipt line will not.

Suppliers are records, not relationships

Everything the person who usually orders knows should be in the supplier record: contact person, phone, payment terms in days, minimum order amount, contract dates, and a rating you actually update.

Two of these earn their keep immediately:

• Payment terms turn a pile of invoices into a payment schedule, and a schedule into a cash-flow forecast.
• Minimum order amount stops the small top-up order that costs more in delivery than it saves in stock.

The rating is worth keeping honestly. “Cheapest per kilo” is not the same as “cheapest per usable kilo delivered on time”, and the second one is the number that pays the rent.

A weekly rhythm that works

1. Order from par levels, not from a look in the fridge. The system knows what is low; a glance does not.
2. One person receives, and they check against the PO, not against the invoice.
3. Reject at the door. Anything accepted is yours, whatever it looks like the next morning.
4. Review the expected-versus-actual delivery gap monthly, and have the conversation with the supplier who keeps losing it.

None of this is expensive. All of it is much cheaper than the alternative, which is discovering in the accounts that you paid for food you never ate.