Delivery that doesn’t match the PO

The workflow

A supplier delivery arrives at a branch, what is signed for does not match the purchase order — short, substituted, or priced differently — and nobody reconciles the two before the invoice is paid.

What happens today

The receiver signs the paper delivery receipt at the back door while the driver waits, takes a photo of it, and sends the photo to the branch group on Viber. The purchase order is in somebody else’s inbox. The invoice arrives at the end of the month and is paid against the total, not against the lines.

There is no formal reconciliation of delivery receipts against purchase orders, and no three-way match of purchase order, delivery receipt, and invoice. A short delivery is not caught by a control; it is caught by whoever happens to remember. Two cases of cooking oil is a small number in a month, and small numbers repeated across branches and suppliers are the ones that quietly cost the month.

What ordinary rules handle

Most of this is arithmetic and a clock, and we build it as ordinary rules because ordinary rules are cheaper, checkable, and behave the same way next month.

• Matching each receipt line to its purchase order line by item and unit, and subtracting.
• Comparing the delivered price to the agreed price on the order.
• Holding the invoice for that purchase order while a gap is open.
• Reminding the supplier on a schedule, and routing the open item to the branch manager who owns it.

Where the assistant follows through

This is the part we call follow-through: the assistant checks the records, prepares the action, routes it, chases the reply, and raises what it cannot settle.

What rules cannot do is read a photograph of a carbon-copy receipt, or decide that “veg oil 20L” on the supplier’s form is the item the order calls cooking oil. AI reads the photograph and makes that call, and it is a smaller part of the job than it sounds.

1. The receipt photo becomes a draft receiving record. The lines are read off DR-8871 and set against PO-2214. Draft, because nothing has been posted yet.
2. The order and the receipt are matched line by line. Twenty cases billed, eighteen received.
3. The short delivery is flagged with its evidence attached. The receipt line and the purchase order line travel with the exception, so the next person to look at it is not re-doing the check.
4. A supplier query is drafted and routed. Drafted, not sent, and put in front of the branch manager with the two cases and the ₱3,900 already worked out.
5. The reply is chased and the exception is escalated. If the supplier goes quiet, the reminder goes out on schedule. If the supplier answers with a different SKU, or the receipt cannot be read at all, it is raised rather than guessed at.

Where a person decides

Accepting the substitution or disputing the short delivery is the manager’s call, and the assistant cannot take it. It prepares the query up to that point and stops there — not because a check failed, but because that is where the line was drawn when the workflow was built.

Money moving is a decision. The credit note is recorded, the invoice is released, and the approval stays on the record with the name of the person who gave it. A month later the question “who agreed to pay for two cases we never got” has an answer.