Founders & Small BusinessFree
Purchase Order and Fulfilment Checklist
Every line is normalised to one unit before comparison, and each discrepancy is sorted by whether shipping makes it expensive or merely awkward.
A purchase order arrives for $7,426.80 and looks fine. Read line by line against the quote it came from, it should say $9,507.60. The gap is 28.0% of the order, and most of it is one line where the buyer's system applied a per-jar price to a quantity written in cases. River reads the incoming order against your own price list, converts every quantity to one unit before comparing anything, and recomputes each extended price from scratch.
Every checklist for this is written for the buyer, with an ERP behind it, a tolerance table and a three-way match at invoice time. None of that helps the seller holding the order, because a purchase order is an offer and shipping against it is how you accept. So discrepancies are sorted by their point of no return instead: what is free to fix now, what costs return freight once picked, and what only surfaces when the invoice is short-paid sixty days later.
Written for the small supplier who has just won a much larger customer and cannot tell whether querying the order makes them look careful or difficult. The printed terms on the back are their own document, and the customer contract review reads them properly. A stale quoted price is a price increase communication problem before it is a billing one. Afterwards, the order and fulfilment reconciliation checks what actually shipped, and the settlement reconciliation finds the deductions.
Two lines can both say the wrong unit and only one of them costs money
On Ellery's order, line one reads 480 each of a product sold only by the case of 12. That is 40 cases, and the money is already right, because $3.90 times 480 is the same $1,872.00 as 40 cases at $46.80. It is still worth a call, since the buyer's warehouse may be expecting 480 saleable units. Line three reads 24 cases at $5.10, which is the per-jar price. Twenty-four cases at $61.20 is $1,468.80, so that line is short by $1,346.40.
Both errors are a unit of measure written in the wrong column, and no tolerance table catches either, because line one is inside every tolerance and line three is a 92% price variance that reads as deliberate discounting. Converting both to jars separates them: line one comes to the 480 its price already assumed, line three to 288 at $61.20 a case. Then each extended price is recomputed rather than trusted. Line four is a quieter version, still carrying the $43.20 case price from eleven weeks ago against a current $46.80, which is $108.00.
Timing is the rest of it, because the terms on the back of the order are settled by shipping. An order for prompt shipment invites acceptance either by a promise to ship or by the shipment itself, and between merchants the buyer's additional terms become part of the contract unless notification of objection is given within a reasonable time. Ellery's quote said Net 15 and the order says Net 60. Those 45 days cost $134.80 at 11.5%, and a written query costs nothing.
How it works
Send the order
The PO itself, including the printed terms on the back that nobody reads.
Add your quote
What you quoted them, your current price list, and where those two have drifted apart.
Say how you ship
Case sizes, order multiples, minimums and lead times, so the quantities can be checked.
Send the clarification
The line-level comparison, the terms delta, and the query to send before anything is picked.
What you get
- Every line normalised to a single base unit before any quantity or price is compared
- Extended prices recomputed from scratch, so an arithmetic error cannot pass as a discount
- Each discrepancy sorted by point of no return: before acknowledging, before picking, or at invoice
- The terms delta between the order and your quote, priced where it can be priced
- SKUs, pack structure and minimums checked against what you can actually ship
- The clarification to send, written to be answered rather than to assign blame
Common questions
Will querying the order make me look difficult to a big customer?
The opposite, if the query is specific. A message naming line three, the per-jar price against a case quantity, and the corrected figure is a buyer's easiest email of the day, because it tells them exactly what to change. What annoys a large buyer is a short shipment, a wrong SKU, or an invoice that does not match their order.
The price on the order is lower than my current price. Do I have to honour it?
It depends on what you quoted and when. A price you genuinely quoted and never withdrew is usually the price, which is why a stale quote is worth reissuing rather than arguing about. A per-unit price appearing against a case quantity is a different thing entirely, and it is a clerical error rather than a price you offered.
What does the printed terms page on the back actually do?
Between merchants, the buyer's additional terms can become part of the contract unless you object within a reasonable time. Payment days, return rights, chargeback schedules and freight all live there, and shipping is the point at which the question closes. Objecting is a short written note, and it needs to go before the goods do.
Is this not what a three-way match already does?
A three-way match sits in the buyer's accounts payable and runs after delivery, comparing their order, their receipt and your invoice. It protects them from overpaying. It finds nothing before you ship, and by the time it fires the cheap fixes have all expired and the argument is about a deduction.
I sell in cases and they order in each. Is that always a problem?
Not always, and that is why both get flagged separately. Ellery's line one was 480 each of a case-only product, which came to exactly 40 cases at the right money. It still needs confirming, because the buyer's warehouse may be expecting 480 individually saleable units, which is a different product Ellery does not make.
How long should I give them before I ship anyway?
Set the deadline from your production start rather than their dock date, and say so in the query. Ellery has nine days to the dock and starts jarring on Thursday, so the real cut-off is Wednesday. Name that date, state what you will ship absent a reply, and the decision stops being yours alone.
Purchase Order and Fulfilment Checklist
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