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In my QuickBooks Online review, I walked through Craig the landscaper and how he would handle both a small job and a large job inside QBO. At the end of that piece I mentioned a free purchasing guide on the eight most common purchase order mistakes. This is that article. If you read the review, you already know I am not coming at this from an accounting angle. I am coming at this from 22 years of experience in processing purchase orders and dealing with their after-affects, and what I saw repeatedly were the same PO errors showing up on po after po. Let me walk you through them.
No PO number. Every purchase order needs a unique identifier. Without one there is no reference point for order tracking or delivery, no way to perform document matching for invoices, and nothing to cite when a shipping dispute occurs. It sounds like the most basic purchasing requirement imaginable, and yet it sometimes gets skipped.
Vendor information errors. In any industry, suppliers can have similar names, similar addresses, and similar product lines. Be cautious about names with abbreviations or just initals. It’s imperative you verify if they are indeed part of the true legal business name. Entering in the wrong vendor record can lead to delayed shipments, misdirected payments, and headaches during tax preparation. Verify every vendor record before the PO leaves your hands.
Vague item descriptions. Generic descriptions give the vendor too much room for interpretation. Products can look alike, be priced similarly, and carry nearly identical SKU numbers. Your description might even be correct and call out a specific size or color, but if the part number you listed does not match, the vendor will ship per the manufacturer part number (not your description). If the wrong item shows up, your only leverage in that vendor dispute is what you wrote on the original purchase order. Write it specific enough to eliminate guessing, and always verify the details against the part number before the PO goes out.
Ignoring unit of measure. This one is one of the most preventable and most repeated procurement mistakes I have ever seen. Ordering twelve cases instead of twelve each is a real, costly purchasing error that happens more than anyone wants to admit. Without clearly stated units of measure (UOM) on every line, you are leaving yourself open to pricing errors and billing disputes that take far more time to fix than they would have taken to prevent.
No order acknowledgment. Sending the purchase order is not the same as the vendor receiving it, accepting it, or being able to fulfill the order on your timeline. A written order acknowledgment with an estimated ship date is the only thing that tells you the order is actually in process. Without it you are operating entirely on assumptions.
Working on 3-way matching.
Skipping three-way matching. The purchase order, the packing slip, and the vendor invoice all need to match before any accounts payable payment goes out. This is not optional and it is not something you do when you have extra time. It is the internal control step that catches vendor overcharges, short shipments, and duplicate billing before they become permanent losses.
No job name on the PO. If the purchase order is not tied to a specific job name or project name, the material costs have nowhere to land in your job costing. You finish the work, look at your numbers, and have no clear picture of project profitability. Job profitability starts with one field on the purchase order. It keeps the audit trail cleaner, speeds up 3-way matching, and makes it much easier to pull everything together when the job is done.
Missing delivery instructions. The ship-to address field is not a formality. Whether the material delivery is residential or commercial, whether a liftgate service is required, whether someone needs to call ahead — these details must appear on the purchase order document itself. Not in a follow-up email. Not in a phone call that nobody documented. On the PO. If a truck arrives at the job site and nobody is there to receive it, that truck goes back to the terminal. Now you are paying re-delivery fees, your materials are sitting in a warehouse, and your crew is standing around on your dime. Every one of those overhead costs was avoidable.
The purchase order is not paperwork for the sake of paperwork. It is the document that protects your price, your delivery, and your profit margins. Every field matters. Every detail has a downstream consequence. If there is an error, it’s like the ripple effect in a pond. The small business owner who treats PO integrity seriously is the one who actually knows at the end of the job whether he made money.
Grab the free one-page purchasing guide below. All eight mistakes on a single page you can print, keep at your desk, or share with whoever handles your purchasing and receiving. If you want to see the full walkthrough, the video is linked here: https://youtu.be/Na7PwOnFJEM
Stronger POs. Better margins.
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Download the 8 Common Purchase Order Mistakes Guide
Educational content only. Not professional advice. Use at your own risk.
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