45 posts tagged with "Purchasing" — Page 3

Your accountant plans cash flow from your accounting file — and until the supplier's invoice arrives, an open purchase order is invisible there. You have committed the money, the goods are on their way, and the books show nothing. For businesses ordering weeks ahead of delivery, that gap can hide a large slice of upcoming spend.

Committed-spend billing closes it. Turn it on and every purchase order you submit posts a bill for its unbilled amount right away, so committed inventory spend appears in your books the moment you commit to it. Each committed bill then looks after itself: it shrinks as real supplier invoices are recorded against the order, and disappears entirely once the order is fully billed.

Your suppliers rarely reach every one of your warehouses in the same number of days. The same vendor might land stock at your main warehouse in two weeks but take six by sea to a warehouse in another region — yet SKU.io applied a single lead time to every destination, so one of those reorder recommendations was always built on the wrong number. Per-warehouse lead times let you set a default lead time on a supplier and then override it for individual warehouses, and demand planning automatically uses the right one for each destination you forecast.

Drop-shipping should be the easiest kind of fulfillment — your supplier ships straight to the customer and you never touch the stock. In practice, an out-of-stock order would quietly backorder against your own warehouse instead of routing to the supplier, and when it didn't drop-ship there was no single place to see why. Drop-ship automation brings the whole flow together: a Drop-ship Status panel that shows exactly why an order will (or won't) route to a supplier, automatic routing of eligible out-of-stock orders, a purchase order created and sent on your behalf, and a clear view of whether that PO actually reached the supplier. No more guessing, no more silent backorders.

Customizing your PDF documents — invoices, purchase orders, packing slips, quotes, credit notes — used to mean wrestling a word-processor-style editor that had its own ideas about your layout. Simple requests like "make the items table span the full page" were surprisingly hard, and anyone comfortable with HTML had to fight the editor's constant reformatting. The new PDF Template Editor replaces all of that with a proper split-pane workspace: your template's HTML on one side, a live PDF preview on the other, and a built-in Template AI assistant that can make layout changes for you from a plain-English instruction — "make the items table full width", "add a Supplier SKU column", "match a clean Stripe-style invoice". Every AI edit is validated, shown as a reviewable diff, and never saved until you say so.

If you plan how much to buy from each supplier every month, that plan probably lives in a spreadsheet — and reconciling it means exporting purchase orders, pivoting them by supplier and month, and eyeballing the result against your budget. By the time you spot an overrun, the money is already spent. Purchasing Targets brings the whole loop into SKU: set a monthly purchase target per supplier, and a live report compares it against your actual purchase orders — with variance, mid-month pacing, and exactly how much room you have left to buy.

Real business relationships are never one person. Your supplier has a sales rep who quotes, an AR specialist who chases invoices, and a shipping coordinator who books freight — but until now, SKU.io gave you a single "contact name" field and left the rest to sticky notes and inbox archaeology. Contacts replaces that flat field with a full contact book on every supplier, customer, and warehouse: unlimited people, each with a role, email, phone, title, and notes, one of them starred as the primary. Contacts show up right in your supplier, customer, and warehouse lists, flow through import and export like any other data in SKU.io, and their personal details are encrypted at rest.

If you buy or sell across a border, the Incoterm is one of the most consequential fields on the order — it decides who pays the freight, who insures the goods, who clears customs, and the exact moment risk stops being yours. Until now, SKU.io treated it as little more than a note: a free-text code on purchase orders, nothing at all on sales orders, and no explanation of what any of it meant. Incoterms changes that. The 11 official ICC Incoterms® 2020 rules now ship built into every account with plain-English education, a term on an order is a complete value — code, named place, and edition — that's locked into history, and every screen that touches a term can explain exactly who is responsible for what.

Granular permissions let you decide exactly who can approve a purchase order — but until now, everyone else hit a dead end. A purchasing clerk could build the perfect draft PO and then… nothing. No button, no handoff, no trail. The request lived in a Slack message, the decision lived in someone's head, and the draft sat unnoticed. Purchase Order Approval Requests closes that gap: anyone who can edit a purchase order can now submit it for approval in one click, everyone with approval rights is notified instantly, and the decision — approve, or reject with a reason — lands right back on the order where the whole team can see it.

You set Net 30 on a purchase order, the supplier's invoice arrives — and then nothing. The due date was something you typed in by hand (or didn't), it rendered as plain grey text, and nothing in SKU.io ever told you a payment was about to slip. Late fees, missed early-pay discounts, and a scramble at month-end were the result. Invoice Due Dates & Payment Scheduling closes that loop end to end: due dates now derive themselves from your payment terms, every invoice and bill wears a live overdue / due-soon status, a proper payables aging report shows who you owe by bucket, you can pay a supplier's whole statement in one recorded payment, and the correct due date flows through to Xero and QuickBooks Online so your accounting reports finally agree with SKU.io.

If you build what you sell, planning has meant exporting to a spreadsheet and working the math by hand — which finished goods to build, which components that build will burn through, what's already on order, and what you still need to buy before you run short. SKU's old demand suggestions only ever looked at the finished product one level deep; they never opened up the recipe underneath. Material Requirements Planning replaces that with a full multi-level engine: one run explodes every bill of materials, nets each part against everything you have and everything that's coming, and hands you dated planned orders to make, buy, and transfer — all in one place.