Guide / the buying side
Inventory and procurement on one record
Buying is where stock truth begins — and where it leaks when purchasing lives beside inventory instead of on it. Here is the wired version, from demand signal to reconciled bill.
The short answer
- The seam between stock and buying is where purchasing goes blind — reorders from memory, receipts typed late, supplier bills matched by archaeology.
- The wired version: demand raises purchase orders, receipts update quantities the moment cartons open, bills reconcile against order and receipt.
- GST detail travels the whole path — inc and ex views for Australian suppliers.
- BSimple runs this loop on one record — from $180/month (AUD) with a free trial.
- 01The short answer
- 02What unwired purchasing costs
- 03The wired loop, and where BSimple fits
What unwired purchasing costs
Reordering by memory: the buyer walks the shelf, guesses, and emails the supplier — no reorder level, no document, nothing to reconcile against later. Receipts that lag: the delivery arrives Tuesday, the record learns Thursday, and everything sold in between oversold. Bills matched by archaeology: month-end arrives and someone matches supplier invoices to orders and receipts by memory — the three-way match as a penalty exercise. GST by mental arithmetic: suppliers quote inc and ex, invoices mix both, and the BAS inputs get rebuilt by hand.
Each failure is a seam between purchasing and stock. The wired version removes the seam rather than managing it: the purchase order is a document on the same record the stock lives on, the goods receipt updates quantities against it, and the supplier bill reconciles against both.
The wired loop, and where BSimple fits
We build BSimple, so weigh that. The loop: reorder and par levels watch live quantities and signal demand; purchase orders are raised from that demand — supplier, quantities, lead times on the document; goods receipts count stock in against the order as cartons open, variances visible the same day; supplier bills reconcile against order and receipt with GST-inc and ex-GST views, variances flagged so overcharging surfaces on the day. Everything the buyer needs is on the document; everything the accountant needs crosses the bridge — how the Xero integration works specifies that side, with MYOB alongside and US systems rolling out.
The boundary: BSimple does not do tendering, three-quotes governance or enterprise procurement workflows — it is the buying loop for small-to-medium wholesale, manufacturing, distribution and trade businesses, not a procurement department suite. The operations models page covers the reorder-point thinking behind the loop, and the inventory management overview shows the record it runs on. Plans from $180/month (AUD), with the free trial to run one real delivery through it — and supplier management as the relationship layer around that loop.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can BSimple raise purchase orders automatically?
BSimple raises them from demand: when quantities dip below the reorder or par levels you set, the buying side sees the signal and the purchase order is raised on the same record. The judgment stays yours; the watching and the document are the system's.
How does supplier bill reconciliation work?
Supplier bills match against the purchase order and the goods receipt — the three-way check — with GST-inc and ex-GST views so Australian supplier invoices reconcile without arithmetic. Price variances flag on the day, which is when a supplier conversation actually helps.
Do we need a separate procurement tool?
Not for the SME buying loop: demand signals, purchase orders, receipts and reconciliation belong on the stock record they act on. Separate procurement suites earn their cost for tendering, approval hierarchies and enterprise supplier governance — a different scale and a different category.
What should we trial first on the purchasing side?
One real delivery: raise the purchase order from a reorder signal, receive it scanned against the document, reconcile the supplier bill with GST views. If those three steps run clean on your goods, the loop works — the free trial is where to run them.
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