Keeping track of purchase orders is essential to making the world work today. Every booming e-commerce business, every global shipping company, and every coffee shop near your house depends on purchase orders and the tracking of goods. As a business owner, keeping a check on your different processes is crucial. Inventory management is an important aspect of running a successful business. With the implementation of inventory and order management software in your business, you can keep track of your supply, handle your inventory better, fulfill orders on time, and many other benefits.
How can a purchase order be tracked? What is the point of tracking a purchase order in a smaller business? Can inventory management software track your orders in inventory? After discussing the fundamentals of purchase order tracking, let’s investigate how companies can benefit from software as a service today to meet these needs.
What is Purchase Order Tracking?
Getting a purchase order tracked step-by-step from conception to final delivery is called purchase order tracking. It is possible to track the same goods at different points in time with multiple purchase orders, depending on the item in question.
Manual tracking in inventory management involves a lot of paperwork and miscommunication, which was done in the past. Modern tracking of purchase orders standardizes the process and makes companies more efficient than they would have predicted thirty years ago.
The importance of purchase orders
In order to understand why tracking purchase orders is so important, let’s first examine the reason why purchase orders are such an integral part of your business strategy. The operations of many small businesses are simple and there are few employees, so they rarely need purchase order forms. When businesses reach a certain size, however, having a control and tracking system in place becomes crucial.
In a legal sense, purchase orders act as agreements between you and your supplier. Arrangements like this bind you to orders you request, helping to guard you against sudden price increases and general disagreements in procurement. Purchase orders help you avoid duplicate orders, unauthorized purchases, and problems with order payments internally.
Purchase orders reduce paperwork and save time and money for your business. They can also simplify record-keeping.
How were purchase orders traditionally handled?
The process of maintaining purchase orders can simplify record keeping and procurement, but they can also be complex. Prior to the digital era, all purchase orders were paper-based.
It is mandatory to create two copies, one of which is sent to the supplier, usually via mail, and the other is kept on file internally. Business owners, who had to keep track of all those purchase order copies, could quickly become overwhelmed.
It is fortunately possible to track orders using tracking software programs without having to keep copies of orders and get calls from customers requesting information about their order status. Your customers can now be kept informed about their orders with tracking software. Check out some features offered by purchase order tracking software.
Four features to look for when choosing Purchase Order Tracking software
An effective tracking system for purchase orders should provide the following four features:
- Updates of quantity automatically
- Capabilities for reporting
- Technician submission abilities
- Enhancements to feature capabilities
To evaluate these four fields, what are some important questions you should ask?
Updates of quantity automatically
Does your software automatically update your quantity to +700 when you submit a purchase order for 700 rubber bands, or does this need to be done manually? Do you have access to see items as they are used in your PO software? How much manual work is involved in updating your quantity information?
Capabilities for reporting
You might be interested in knowing whether your purchase order tracking software provides you with detailed spending reports. If you have to work within a narrow framework of templates, can you customize reports to meet your company’s needs?
Technician submission abilities
Your technicians can send you a purchase order, but do you have the capability to approve or deny it quickly? Do you and your employees need any special training to use the software? How much will equipment cost? What kinds of equipment will be needed?
Additional feature capabilities
Does your CMMS already have order tracking capabilities, or are you going to buy a software package that only tracks orders? In the same way that different departments of a business should integrate smoothly, the best purchase order tracking software is part of a larger software solution.
The answers to these questions provide you and your company with a great starting point to evaluating your different options. In general, the simpler a system is to use and the greater flexibility it offers, the easier it will be to integrate into your company’s existing systems.
If your existing systems can track orders, you might not need an order tracking system. Your computerized maintenance management system is the best way to track purchase orders.
How to find the best Purchase Order Tracking solution for your needs
In the end, only the business or organization in need of purchase order tracking can determine what is the right solution for them. There are usually only parts of a larger solution to that problem, just as the accounting department of a company is only part of the entire company.
The Inventooly purchase order tracking solution works in just that way. This is ideal because our CMMS solution keeps the different processes of a company working together and not overlap with one another. Unlike other piecemeal solutions, when you work with Inventooly, you are able to consider the entirety of your company in one place, from one dashboard.
If you are looking for inventory management software to manage your inventory or track orders from your inventory, check out Inventooly to meet your inventory management needs and ensure that your business runs smoothly.
Leave a Reply