Why Should You Use Purchase Orders for Alcohol Ordering?
As a retailer, whether you have chosen to sell alcohol because it drives traffic into your business, creates a better experience for your customers, or offers you the best profit margins, you want to ensure that you have an efficient and accurate system in place to control your alcohol purchases and spend. If you are currently selling alcohol, you are well aware of the challenges you face staying on top of all the different ways you can lose money through the purchase process alone.
Some of your most challenging issues when you order your alcohol may include:
- Reconciling an invoice with an original order to ensure you received exactly what you ordered
- Calling for credits, tracking their receipt, and tying them back to the correct invoice
- Receiving and paying for product delivered that was not the brand you ordered
- Catching price discrepancies on your invoices
These are just a few of the many circumstances you may be experiencing, and there are solutions you can implement that will give you back the time you waste trying to manage them. Implementing the use of purchase order (PO) numbers into your alcohol ordering process will create some necessary checks and balances that will do just that - give your distributor a PO number with your written order to use on the invoice, and tie the invoice back to your original order. Doing this will get you moving in the right direction.
Using POs can:
- Efficiently track credits due to you
- Give you clear visibility into your purchasing amounts and quantities
- Help you identify price discrepancies and ensure accurate billing
- Simplify reconciliation by tying the invoice back to the original order
- Identify issues at time of delivery - delivery matches the product and quantity ordered
- Provide a record of what has been ordered and approved for purchase
- Keep your pricing strategy on track within your beverage alcohol category
- Help you stay in control of your inventory investments while maintaining in-stock levels for customers
- Keep control of authorized products
Implementing POs can offer clear benefits for your beverage alcohol business. However, it used to be that POs could create other tedious and manual processes to take advantage of the highly impactful information it offers. The good news is there is now a product that does PO manual work for you electronically. Fintech has created OrderSource™ – a PO management tool that electronically communicates your POs to your distributors. It automatically ties the PO back to the invoice received from the distributor, while comparing the expected cost to the invoice total, thus eliminating manual processes that were necessary to reap the benefits of POs. To receive more information on this Fintech resource click here, call us at 800-572-0854 ext. 3893, or send us an email.