Purchasing, suppliers and the product catalogue

Purchasing owns buyer orders, receiving, invoice review, the supplier ledger and accounting handoff. Products are shared buyer identities used by Purchasing, Stock and Production. A supplier business has global identity but each buyer's trading relationship, prices, account code, terms and documents remain private.

Workspace map and supplier setup#

Onboard supplier establishes the buyer relationship; supplier users operate through the supplier portal with their own membership. They do not need buyer staff access. A disabled or conflicting existing Soupy identity cannot keep using supplier membership to read private relationships or invite people.

Supplier invitations require a verified recipient email and current authority from the original inviter when accepted. A supplier administrator must still hold that role with the same valid identity. For a buyer's first supplier administrator invitation, the original buyer must still manage Purchasing in the same organisation and originally authorised Purchasing workspace. The recipient's own access cannot substitute for that authority. Older pending invitations without a recorded authority check must be reissued; existing accepted memberships keep their independent access.

Discovery publishes only approved public catalogue/service/credential summaries. A discovery request is an introduction, not an approved trading account.

Catalogue, prices and comparison#

Supplier manual input, file imports and signed API submissions create immutable staged revisions. Buyers review row validation/diffs and approve catalogue identity, then separately accept an exact equivalent or acceptable substitute for a canonical product variant. An identifier match alone does not authorise substitution. Variants carry explicit units, identifiers and lot/expiry policy; allergen candidates remain separate from reviewed declarations.

Price revisions belong to a confidential relationship and target Group, Legal Entity or Site. More specific approved terms take precedence. Overlapping live terms require explicit supersession; locks, effective dates and historical terms remain respected. The reviewed row binds description, pack and unit.

Compare & buy shows effective ex-VAT cost, free quantity, tax/deposit, delivery, minimum order, freshness, availability and conditions. Supported offer rules include quantity tiers, free goods, fixed/percentage discounts, promotional prices, bundles, mix-and-match and delivery/spend incentives. The shared calculator enforces stackability and exclusions. A displayed cheap price is not orderable until its conditions and approved mapping are satisfied.

Order and receiving workflow#

1. Build a draft from current approved terms, selecting supplier relationship, destination and valid quantities. Review goods, discounts, deposits, VAT and delivery. The draft freezes its approved term revision and calculation.
2. Obtain independent order approval. Mark the approved immutable revision sent through its configured portal/email/API route. API suppliers require an outbound endpoint; queued delivery, acceptance and receipt are separate states.
3. Review supplier acknowledgement, rejection, back-order or change proposal. Accepting a material revision returns the PO to draft for fresh approval.
4. Record actual goods received at the Site. Supplier ASNs/dockets may prefill but remain claims. Confirm quantity, rejected/damaged/substituted goods and required lot/expiry/private-photo evidence.
5. Correct an erroneous receipt by attributable reversal/replacement. Original receipt evidence remains available. Confirmed receipt intake into Stock is a separate mapped physical-stock operation.

Configured API dispatch signs an exact order revision and retries a bounded five times. Exhaustion is visible and needs review. A supplier's status cannot silently rewrite the buyer's approval, delivery destination or received quantity.

Invoice review, discrepancies and settlement#

Capture an invoice or credit note from private PDF/image evidence. OCR produces an editable draft with confidence. Human review creates the version used for explained two- or three-way matching; raw extracted text expires after 30 days. One document may allocate across multiple orders/receipts, and vice versa.

Reconciliation requires current access to every contributing order, receipt and prior invoice or credit, including their original Sites. Invoice review or approval alone does not grant purchase-order access; a reviewer can use separate scoped PO-read authority. Saved matching results, buyer discrepancies, invoice approval, manual payment recording, accounting exports and Purchasing work shown to the Assistant retain that source boundary. Reports apply their distinct reporting permission to each contributor. A later supplier-linked replacement or credit adds its own source requirement. Unavailable contributors remove the derived record before totals or counts are returned. Non-PO invoices retain their separate evidence and independent approval.

Results created without complete source records are retained but unavailable. A fresh authorized reconciliation can replace missing source evidence only in a supported review/matching state with known source details. Invoices awaiting approval, approved, exported or settled do not have that ordinary recovery path. Reconstructing historical authority from current access or current record placement is not supported.

Missing receipts/dockets, duplicate documents, unresolved shortages, substitutions, stale terms, low confidence and price/quantity/tax discrepancies hold the full payable. A supplier response needs an independent buyer decision. Factual gaps require corrected evidence and rematching. Non-PO documents have separate coding, evidence and approval; they do not create retrospective POs.

Independent invoice approval creates supplier ledger evidence. Accounting handoff freezes approved CSV/XLSX mappings and export content. A configured SFTP profile is configuration, not proof a file was transferred. Importing settlement records or recording payment evidence describes an external payment; Soupy does not initiate the bank transfer from Purchasing.

Reports, migration and permissions#

Reports retain each contributor's enabled module and actual Site permission. Unpermitted price books, stock or recipe cost cannot leak through totals. Migration stages source-hashed master data, review-required open work and a read-only legacy archive. Explicit adoption makes eligible source work native; cutover comparison/certification, activation and rollback retain checkpoints. Historical imports are labelled source evidence, not fabricated Soupy audit.

General, Suppliers, Orders, Invoices and Approvals settings are currently section shells. The concrete controls above live in their operational workspaces. A supplier user never gains buyer capabilities through supplier membership.