PlatformBuying → Buying
Buying is the buying team’s page, in three tabs: Purchase orders, What to order and Suppliers. It opens on the purchase orders, because what you have already asked for comes before what you might ask for next. Raising and changing orders is an owner or manager job; everyone else can read the page.
Purchase orders
A purchase order here is the operations copy of what you asked a supplier for: product, how many, and when you were promised it. Nothing about price is stored on the order. Instead it is valued from what you have agreed to pay that supplier (see Suppliers below), and a line with no agreed cost is counted and named rather than priced at nothing.
- New order → choose the supplier. The product list becomes what you buy from them, though typing any product still works.
- Add the lines and the date you want them, and a note if it helps ("Ring Dave before 3pm"). Raise the order.
- Open it to send it: Copy as text for a phone call or a chat, Print / PDF, or Email the supplier when their address is on the contact card.
- Then mark it Sent by phone or Sent by email. Later it can be marked Running late, with the supplier's reason and the new day, or cancelled.
The tiles along the top are Still owed, Due this week, Past their day and Landed this week. The filters under them are Still owed, Due this week, Overdue, Landed and Everything. Each row shows the order, the supplier, when it is expected, what is on it, its delivery, how it was sent and its status: Draft, Sent, Running late, Landed or Cancelled. Export CSV downloads the list.
The order and the delivery are one thing
An order gets onto the dock one of four ways, and they all end in the same place. Book the delivery on the order puts an approved slot on Live bookings. Link a delivery on the board ties it to one that is already there. A schedule you import with the PO number in a column links itself. And the supplier, on their portal, can ask for a slot against one of their open orders, so the request arrives already carrying it. However it got there, linking fills the delivery’s expected lines from the order, so the checker at goods in reconciles the goods against what was bought, not a blank sheet.
The order lands by itself when the checker books the first pallet in against that delivery. On a site with no goods-in check, the office releasing the driver lands it instead. Nobody has to tick it off by hand.
The supplier confirms before the lorry
Every open order sits on the supplier’s portal with its lines. They confirm what they will actually send, line by line, with a promised date and a note. On your side the order says who confirmed it and when, or “Not yet confirmed by the supplier”. Each line shows Ordered, Confirmed and, once the goods are checked in, Received, with the fill rate for the order. If they confirm short, the expected lines the checker works from drop to the confirmed figure. A short you know about days before the lorry is far easier than one found at the gate.
Suppliers
- What you pay. Pick a supplier to see what you buy from them: the product, their code for it, the cost and when it was last agreed. Add a product they sell you, change a cost, or drop in their price file (a product code and a cost per row is enough).
- Lead times and order cut-offs. How many days each supplier takes, and for each weekday the time you must order by and when it lands. A supplier with no cut-off set shows a sentence saying so, not a made-up countdown.
- The scorecard. On time and in full, fill rate and how often a supplier confirms are shown only in the example workspace for now. On your own workspace this part of the tab says there is no supplier record yet and scores nothing.
What to order
What to order will work out a reorder list per product from how fast it goes, the supplier’s lead time and what you hold and have on order. On your own workspace it does not draw that list yet. The tab shows how many products, suppliers and purchase orders you have on record and links to where you add them. Only the example workspace shows a worked list, and nothing on your tab is estimated.
Where suppliers come from