globo terrestreLet’s just stick with the purchase order for a moment.  Now that we have a nice one line item sales order for the cabinetry portion of the order, it’s life on easy street, right?

The Purchase Order Problem

Well, that is until you have to generate the purchase order.  Ever try to submit a one line item purchase order to a manufacturer?  I’ll take one $6,455.32 kitchen please.  You can almost hear customer service on the other end snickering.

No problem, though. Your next logical conclusion will be to have purchasing enter the detailed line items into the accounting system’s purchase order module (or worse yet, you’ll have the sales people submit the items list from your design software to place the order).  In come the faxes and paperwork to purchasing, up rise your labor costs to key all that stuff in, and in rush the mistakes and last minute changes.  Your sales reps can’t figure out why everything they order has some sort of mistake, the finger pointing begins and now your purchasing staff hates life.

Invariably, your labor costs and mistakes eat you alive and someone decides that you could save a ton of time if you just enter a one-line item onto the purchase order.  It’s like the repeat of a bad movie that you just know is going to have the worst ending ever.

Once this happens your purchase orders are broken, your back order process is hosed, and your receiving tickets become non existent as you receive using the bill of lading from the manufacturer (or worse yet, from the items list printout from your design software).

Not to worry though, because when I talk to owners, this kind of stuff is really no problem.  Of course when I talk to their employees, it’s a huge problem.

The World of Grey

Welcome to the world of grey.  Where employees can’t win, accounting vendors don’t care (hey, they have your money, the rest of this stuff is just issues that you can work through provided you still pay them to help) and owners are ignorant of what really goes on.

The world of the grey is a formidable place – one where the details of where the rubber meets the road will eat your hard earned cash quickly like the worst sweet tooth you can imagine.

Keep your business in a healthy place – accounting systems that “do everything” just cause decay.

Click here to read part 2 of this series…

Find out how you can manage your entire sales, purchasing and management process within Equilibrium (formerly Aurora) software.