Did you know using a handheld scanner to bring your items into the store could cost you thousands of man hours a year? It’s been the accepted practice for decades. All the good retailers do it. But since we’re nearing our 10-year anniversary… we think it’s time to shed light on some flaws in the process that we’ve been fixing to help our stores.
It’s 4 PM on a Friday and your accountant is trying to reconcile invoices received against items delivered to your stores. The vendor is requiring payment, but the accountant is looking for the missing $168 in delivered product. The problem is that none of the multiple shipments available match the total she needs. So… the manhunt begins. Hundreds of accounting manhours are spent hunting down invoices. The final culprit in this case? New pricing wasn’t added to the pricebook in time for delivery, so the invoice never matched the total, so nothing was ever submitted by the store manager. Welcome to the Bermuda Triangle of Receiving.
Is accounting always complaining about mis-matched or missing invoices?
Using a handheld scanner to create the invoice in receiving ASSUMES pricebook is flawlessly managed and some of that is entirely out of your control. I call this the ‘ideal scenario’ trap. We assume that the ideal scenario is the most COMMON scenario. Unfortunately, REAL life is a little messy most times, and we can get lured into the Bermuda Triangle because we don’t realize it has happened until days or sometimes weeks later. For example…
Your pricebook manager depends on PERFECT communication from your suppliers. But… the Supplier may not have sent the right costs to your pricebook manager. Or… maybe the pricebook list wasn’t updated with a last-minute negotiated deal from marketing? With dozens of suppliers to manage and thousands of products, this can happen at LEAST once a month and throw off receiving EVERY time. The more locations… the bigger this problem.
Receiving depends on PERFECTLY executed promotions. Not all of us have access to pre-negotiated deals and firm, consistent lower prices. Our records indicate that the average single store or mid-size chain can experience over $30,000 in supplier price modifications every year across dozens of our thousands of items. Expecting perfection here is probably not realistic and leaves at least a few scanned invoices that won’t match and remain sitting in the Bermuda Triangle. The correction may occur, but everyone is busily focused on sales, and no one notices the invoice hasn’t updated until accounting starts screaming.
Missing New and Promotional Items. Maybe it’s a shipper. Maybe it’s a special holiday promotional item. Somewhere, someplace… someone forgot to tell the pricebook manager to add it. And now, the policy is to reject it completely. Or… hold that invoice until the pricebook manager catches up… Even if you allow those cost overrides in the back office, hunting and pecking through paperwork is unlikely to be prioritized in a store manager’s day and it may be a LONG time before they actually get to it.
For the past decade, Deep Water has been helping stores escape the Bermuda Triangle of Receiving. Our stores enjoy many great hybrid approaches using a digital invoice repository. It’s like a document imaging solution on steroids. Every invoice from every store is stored in our repository - electronic or paper. The data is scrubbed and cleaned and prepped for searching. We add missing UPCs, case quantities and many other amended items to make it PERFECT for receiving itemized inventory into multiple systems JUST like EDI. Think of it like a staging location for all the data coming into your systems. Your business can make whatever adjustment it needs to a supplier’s product catalog without involving IT or the supplier or touching multiple back offices. Some of our stores simply edit the paper and receive the data directly into inventory and some compare at the home office against a scanned set of items. Either way, your whole team will appreciate the simplicity of centralized information and clean data. No more last minute rescues out of the Triangle.
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