Reconcile a purchase from request to payment

Check one complete purchase chain and hand over any remaining work with a clear owner.

Before you start

Choose one purchase and gather its exact references: request, supplier, quotation or agreement, order, receipts, remedies, invoice, payable and payment. Similar names or matching amounts are not enough to join records from different purchases.

Follow the same purchase

1. Open the request in Procure → Requests. Check the need, quantity, unit, date, budget basis, approval decision and procurement owner. Confirm what the decision actually permitted.
2. Reconcile the selected supplier and current offer with any sourcing event, evaluation, award or contract. Check mandatory requirements, qualification conditions, full delivered cost and offer validity. Keep later revisions with their own decisions.
3. Open Orders → Purchase Orders and the exact order. Match Source and lineage, supplier, version, lines, Approval, Issue and delivery plan. An approved but unissued order is not a released instruction.
4. Open Receiving → Receipts and match the same order. Reconcile arrived, accepted, rejected and outstanding quantities in the correct units. Include any return and replacement without erasing the original rejection or counting a no-charge replacement as another purchase.
5. Open the supplier bill in Finance → Vendor bills. Check duplicate risk, invoice version, order and receipt references, accepted quantity, charges, matching evidence and the approved accounting treatment.
6. Open the related payable and source journal. Confirm the same bill, original amount, outstanding amount and posting state. Do not create another expense if an earlier stage already recorded one.
7. Inspect the payment, retained evidence, exact allocation and supported cash result. Compare statement cutoffs when records differ. A saved draft or a selected evidence filename is not a completed payment.
8. Check the final supplier and spend review against this same scope. Keep initial defects, recovery, actual costs and any remaining balance visible rather than reducing the whole purchase to a green status.

Give the next person a useful handoff

State what is complete, what remains open, the exact references, the next responsible person and the next decision or deadline. If payment is partial, state both the supported paid amount and the unpaid balance. If acceptance or matching is unresolved, identify the missing evidence rather than claiming the purchase is finished.

Expected result

Another person can follow the purchase, reproduce its quantity and money reconciliation, and continue the remaining work without creating duplicate records.

Remember: Reuse existing records and act only at their current stage. Do not bypass a missing supplier, reviewer, receipt or payment link with an unrelated record just to complete the chain.

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In this series: Manage purchasing — guide 17 of 17.

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