Purchase and Procure to Pay Module Services

A three-way match compares the purchase order, the goods receipt and the supplier invoice before anything is paid. The order says what you agreed to buy and at what price, the receipt says what actually arrived, and the invoice says what you are being asked to pay. If all three agree on quantity and price within tolerance, the invoice is cleared for payment automatically. If they do not, it is held and routed to whoever can explain the difference.

Usually by value tier and by category, sometimes by cost centre as well. A common shape is that a supervisor clears anything up to about 50,000, a department head up to about 250,000, and a director or the board above that, with capital items and anything outside the approved supplier list routed separately regardless of value. The system holds the matrix, so the approver is decided by the document rather than by who happened to be in the office. Keep the tiers few and the approvers named. A matrix with nine levels gets bypassed within a month.

Not with a policy email. You stop maverick buying by making the controlled path the easier one. Put the approved supplier and the contracted price on the requisition screen so ordering correctly takes fewer clicks than ringing a supplier direct. Then block or flag purchase orders raised against suppliers outside the approved list for that category, and report the exceptions weekly by requester. Most purchasing problems are not solved by a better buyer, they are solved by making the controlled path easier than the workaround.

Yes, and for importers it is the part worth setting up carefully. Freight, duty, insurance, clearing and port charges arrive on separate invoices, often weeks after the goods. A landed cost voucher apportions those charges across the receipt lines, by value, by weight or by volume depending on the charge, and writes the result into the item cost. Without it your unit cost is the supplier price alone, which means your gross margin report is wrong by whatever the freight and duty came to, and on imported goods that is rarely a small number.

A purchase order line stays open until it is fully received or closed by hand, so a partial receipt posts the quantity that arrived and leaves the balance outstanding on the order. Over delivery is governed by a tolerance, often around 5 percent or a small absolute quantity, set per item or per category. Inside tolerance the extra is received and matched. Outside it the receipt is blocked until someone with authority accepts the excess or rejects it. Rejected goods go out on a return to vendor with a debit note, so stock and the payables position both stay right.

Goods receipt is the accounting event, not the purchase order. Receiving the goods debits stock or expense and credits a goods received not invoiced accrual, so the cost sits in the right period even though no invoice has arrived. When the supplier invoice comes in and matches, the accrual is cleared and a payables balance is created against the vendor. That accrual is the period-end number your finance team will ask about, and it is also the quickest health check on your purchasing data: if it is large and old, receipts and invoices are not being matched.