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Best Practices

Follow these operational best practices to maintain purchasing budget controls, prevent vendor overbilling, and ensure smooth financial audits.

1. Checking a supplier invoice before you finalise it

  • Always knock off, never key from scratch: Nothing in BigLedger requires it, so make it a house rule — open the invoice’s KO For tab and pull in the finalised Purchase Order or GRN rather than typing the lines. The copied lines are what you compare against the supplier’s paper.
  • Establish Variance Tolerance Limits: Agree the percentage variance (e.g. maximum 1% on price) your team will accept without escalating. Purchase invoices have no approval engine, so make the escalation a policy and restrict who may finalise an invoice that breaches it.

2. Month-End Reconciliation of Un-invoiced Receipts

  • Audit un-invoiced GRNs monthly: Review GRNs with no invoice against them at month-end to find deliveries the supplier has not billed. Note that on the standard pair the GRN books no stock — the goods are in your warehouse and absent from the stock ledger until the invoice is finalised, so this list is also your stock-timing exposure.
  • Resolve Aged GRNI Accruals: Investigate GRNI balances older than 60 days to clear obsolete receiving records or request missing supplier billing.

3. Vendor Performance Monitoring

  • Track On-Time In-Full (OTIF) Metrics: Monitor supplier delivery reliability by comparing PO promised delivery dates against actual GRN receipt timestamps in the Purchase Report Applet.
  • Quality Rejection Logging: Record all damaged or non-conforming goods returns in the Purchase Return Applet to maintain supplier quality scorecards.