From verbal orders to a purchase trail that adds up
Representative scenario — illustrativeA 2,000-student school runs purchasing on phone calls and a peon with a chit — labs, library, housekeeping and the hostel all order directly from vendors they “know”, and accounts pays whatever invoice arrives.
Nobody can say what was ordered versus what was delivered, so a half-delivered stationery order gets paid in full and the shortfall is discovered a term later. Quotes live in a WhatsApp thread, so every negotiation starts from zero and last year’s rate is a mystery. Capital items — projectors, benches — never make it onto any register.
The cheap ERP gave them a “purchase order” form, but it was just a printout — no approval thresholds, no delivery check-in, no vendor rate history. A capital purchase and a box of chalk needed the same non-existent sign-off, so the office kept approving by hand and stopped raising POs at all. Six months in, the “procurement module” was an empty screen and the corridor verbal-order culture was back, untouched.
ez.school makes the pipeline explicit end to end — requisition, quotes, PO, delivery check-in, payment — with approvals that route by value so consumables move fast and capital purchases gather the right signatures. Deliveries check in against the order, partial deliveries keep their balance visible until closed, and every vendor carries its rate history so the next negotiation starts from fact.
| By hand | Ordinary ERP | ez.school | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raising an order | Verbal, on a chit | A PO printout, no controls | Requisition → threshold approval → PO |
| Checking delivery | Signed for, never matched | No GRN — pay the invoice | Checked in against the PO, balance tracked |
| Vendor rates | Lost in a WhatsApp thread | No history kept | Full rate history per vendor |
| Capital items | Never registered | Bought, then forgotten | Delivered items register as assets |
- Every POMatched to delivery
- ZeroBlind full-payments
- On recordVendor rate history
IT & academics are trending over budget; co-curricular is 15% under-spent — reallocate before year-end.
Committed-versus-delivered by department — the gaps are the orders still owed, not money already leaked.