Three POs, zero certainty
Procurement emails the order. Finance posts a different number. The depot tracks delivery on a whiteboard photo. Supplier chasing becomes a full-time hobby — not because staff lack discipline, but because nobody knows which PO is actually true. This is the same family of problem as email not being a workflow: the inbox is not a system of record.
When the PO lives in three places, you pay in late goods, duplicate orders, invoices matched to wrong lines, and supplier relationships worn thin by "we thought you had it."
Stabilise before you integrate
Pick one PO record — usually finance or ERP if posted spend is the control point, sometimes procurement if the sending act is what matters most. Write that down somewhere the room agrees on. Secondary copies may exist for convenience, but they must reference the master or they are unofficial.
Define the states that both depot and finance recognise: sent, acknowledged, delivered, invoiced. Ban parallel "just for this supplier" spreadsheets unless they are time-boxed with a named reconciliation owner — the same rule that applies in when the spreadsheet becomes the brain.
Supplier chasing as a symptom
If chasing is constant, ask where work is actually waiting. Approval stuck in a founder inbox? Master data wrong? No owner for the acknowledged state? Fixing chase scripts without fixing the truth adds activity, not throughput — the everyone busy, nothing moving piece covers that dynamic in full.
Receipiting discipline matters here too: the depot should confirm against the master PO line, not a photo of a different number. Finance should match the invoice to the same record procurement originally sent.
Approvals and master data
Chasing often starts upstream — a wrong supplier code, a duplicate vendor record, or an approval stuck in a founder inbox. Fix master data once with a named owner before you blame the buyer for calling suppliers twice. The founder bottleneck piece is relevant when every PO waits on one person.
Three-way match — PO, receipt, invoice — only works when all three reference the same PO number. If finance posts before procurement sends, or the depot receipts against an email, match failures become full-time work dressed up as supplier problems.
Open PO ageing on one report the room trusts beats buyer heroics. Leadership sees the backlog before suppliers ring you.
Supplier portals do not fix three PO truths — they add a fourth if your internal record is still split. Stabilise one master PO first, then let suppliers acknowledge against that number if the tool supports it.
If email send and ERP post are both mandatory steps, a thin integration or disciplined export may beat rip-and-replace — the integrate before you replace argument applies. Name an owner for sync failures.
Buyer KPIs should reward on-time acknowledgement and clean matching, not phone volume — otherwise you incentivise chasing over fixing the truth. Review supplier performance from the master PO record, not from inbox archaeology.
Run a monthly PO truth review with procurement, finance, and depot: fifteen minutes, same agenda, until mismatches become boring. Disagreement in that room is cheaper than disagreement with a supplier on the phone. Keep minutes. Patterns repeat until someone owns the fix.
Book a systems review — Teesside and the North East. A process audit when you cannot agree which PO wins.