Purchase order software that locks in the price you agreed.

Purchase order software turns an approved need into a commitment with a supplier and keeps that commitment as the reference for everything after. In Bollard, the PO records the agreed price, the terms and the delivery site, and that record is what receiving and invoice matching check against.

The PO is where price leakage can be stopped. If the agreed price lives in an email thread and the invoice arrives a month later, nobody can easily tell whether the supplier billed what was agreed. Locking the price on the PO gives finance a fixed number to hold the invoice to.

A request for quotation asks several suppliers to price the same items. Bollard sends the RFQs, collects the quotations and shows them side by side, so the buyer can choose one and raise the PO from it.

Comparing quotes is wasted effort if the winning price is then keyed into an order by hand. Raising the PO directly from the chosen quotation keeps the number that won the comparison as the number on the order.

Central buying helps too. In the education configuration, the central store pools faculty orders into bulk purchases. That targets a common problem in school and university groups: faculties paying different prices for the same items.

Bollard has PO types for supplies, equipment and services. Each covers a different kind of spend, and the price lock applies to all three.

Supplies are the recurring consumables most sites order every week, such as lab glassware or sterile PPE kits. Equipment covers capital items, which many organisations track apart from consumables, as the education configuration does. Services cover work performed instead of goods delivered. In the construction configuration, plant hire is tracked from on-hire to off-hire, aimed at a familiar cost: hire still billed after the machine went off-hire.

The PO is the fourth of seven steps: request, approve, source, order, receive, match and pay. It takes in an approved request and hands out the terms that the next two steps enforce.

The step before is approval. The request reaching purchasing has been through the chain set by amount, site and role, with every decision logged.

The steps after are receiving and three-way match. The store receives against the PO line by line, and the invoice is matched against the PO's prices and the accepted quantities. A supplier who bills above the PO price fails the match on value, and payment waits.

A spreadsheet can produce a PO, but the agreed price is re-typed at each step, and a typical ERP often keeps the agreed price in a separate module. Bollard locks the price on the PO and carries that one figure through receiving and matching.

Re-typing is where small errors turn into overpayments. A price copied from a quote to an order to an invoice check has three chances to change. Spreadsheet POs also share everything: send the file and every site's orders go with it. Bollard keeps each site to its own records with row-level security, and the first site is live in about two weeks where an ERP takes months of implementation.