The purchase-to-pay cycle

You’ll need: Purchase orders, Goods receipts, Bills — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Buying is selling in reverse, and FeePrime models it with the same discipline: separate documents, each answering one question, linked so the chain can be followed.

The five steps

   RFQ              "what would you charge for this?"
     |               sent to one or more suppliers
     v
   SUPPLIER QUOTE   their answer, with a validity
     |
     v
   PURCHASE ORDER   "we are ordering it"
     |               a commitment — raises INCOMING stock
     v
   GOODS RECEIPT    what actually arrived
     |               this is what moves stock
     v
   BILL             what the supplier says we owe
                     matched against the order and the receipt

As with sales, few purchases use all five. A quick purchase from a known supplier goes straight to an order, or even to a bill. The chain is there for when the money justifies it.

The three-way match

The reason this is worth doing properly is the oldest control in business, and FeePrime has the three documents that make it possible:

• the purchase order says what you agreed to buy, at what price
• the goods receipt says what actually arrived
• the bill says what the supplier wants paying

When all three agree, pay it. When they do not, you have caught something before the money left — a short delivery invoiced in full, a price that crept up between order and invoice, goods nobody ordered.

Without the middle document you are comparing a bill against an order and hoping that what arrived matched either.

Each step happens once, at the document that knows

Same rule as the inventory course, from the other side. A goods receipt brings stock in. A bill linked to a purchase order does not move stock, because the receipt already did.

A standalone bill — no purchase order behind it — does move stock, because nothing else has.

Where the money is actually made

Most people focus on negotiating the price. The price is on the order, and it is usually the part that goes right.

What goes wrong is in the middle: the short delivery nobody recorded, the substitution accepted at the gate, the damaged carton signed for because the driver was waiting. Every one of those is money, and every one is invisible unless somebody records what actually arrived rather than what was expected.

That is why the receipt lesson in this course is the long one.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, look at the purchase orders, goods receipts and bills lists side by side without creating anything. Notice they are the same list page you already know.