Structuring supplier purchasing in Dolibarr

What purchases without a paper trail cost you

A workshop manager calls the usual supplier and orders aluminium plates. The price is given over the phone, and so is the lead time. Three weeks later the goods arrive, nobody can find the quote, and the invoice shows a different price. The accountant enters it anyway. The following month, the supplier sends a reminder for the same invoice, and nobody knows whether it has already been paid. This story is not unusual in an SME. The problem does not come from the people. It comes from the lack of a single thread linking the request, the order, the delivery and the invoice. The information lives in mailboxes, notebooks and memories. Dolibarr provides that thread: each purchase becomes a series of linked documents, attached to a supplier and visible to those who have the right to see them. This article describes how to build it, in order: suppliers, purchase prices, price requests, orders, receipts, invoices.

A complete supplier record from day one

Everything starts with the third-party record (the fiche tiers). In Dolibarr, one third party can be a customer, a supplier or both: you simply flag it as a supplier. Do not create a duplicate for a company that is already a customer, or you lose the overall view of the relationship. Before you enter or import your suppliers, check that they do not already exist, using their exact company name. A well-filled record saves you from correcting every order, because terms and contact details carry over to purchase documents. Contacts deserve particular attention: the person who receives orders is almost never the one who sends invoices. Create one contact per role and state it in the contact record. Here is what to fill in first for each supplier.

• Full contact details and the company identifier, so that the invoice you receive matches the right legal entity.
• The payment terms and payment method you negotiated, so they carry over automatically to each order and each invoice.
• Bank details, checked by calling the supplier and not just by email.
• An orders contact and a billing contact, kept separate when they are two different people.
• A supplier category, for example raw materials, subcontracting or supplies, to filter your lists and your analyses.

Purchase prices, references and lead times by product

A purchase price is only worth something if it is tied to a supplier and kept up to date. In Dolibarr, you can enter one or more supplier prices on a product record: the supplier's reference, the unit price, the minimum quantity and the delivery lead time. When two suppliers sell the same aluminium plate, you record both, and the buyer compares them when ordering. When you create an order line, you pick the product and the matching supplier price, without retyping the price from memory. Update these prices as soon as the supplier sends a new price list, and not only when an invoice contradicts them. This reference data also feeds your margins: the purchase cost is used in the calculation on customer quotes, according to the cost price method chosen in the configuration. For an item bought only once, a free-text line is still possible, but it leaves no usable history.

From the price request to the approved order

When a purchase goes beyond routine, start with a price request. Dolibarr has a supplier price request module, which you enable in the module list. You build the request with the products and quantities, send it as a PDF by email from the record, then log the supplier's answer. The price and lead time quoted stay in writing, which settles later disagreements. Once you have chosen the best offer, you turn it into a supplier order without retyping anything. The order follows clear statuses: draft, validated, approved, ordered, then partially or fully received. Dolibarr lets you separate the person who prepares an order from the person who approves it, which becomes useful as soon as amounts get sensitive. Decide in writing who approves, and in which cases. For more advanced workflows, see the modules SMEs find useful. Finally, set one simple rule: an order placed by phone is entered the same day.

Receipts and invoices: the three-way check

Receipt is the link that SMEs neglect most. When the goods arrive, record them on the supplier order. Dolibarr handles partial receipts and, if the stock module is active, updates quantities. Without this step, you pay on the strength of a paper delivery note lost in a drawer. Next comes the supplier invoice. Create it from the order rather than from scratch, so that the supplier, the lines and the terms carry over. Enter the reference shown by the supplier: Dolibarr checks that it has not already been recorded for this third party, which blocks the most common duplicate. Training buyers and accountants together, for example with Dolibarr training, helps spread these habits. Before you validate an invoice, compare three things.

• The order: the quantities and prices agreed with the supplier.
• The receipt: what actually arrived, including shortfalls and damaged items.
• The invoice: what the supplier is claiming, line by line, with the agreed discounts.
• The discrepancies: record them on the order or the invoice, not in an isolated email that nobody will find again.

First step: one supplier, one real order

Do not try to move everything at once. Pick your most active supplier, create or clean up its record, then enter the prices of its most purchased products with their lead times. Then place your next real order through Dolibarr, from the price request to the invoice, and note where the team gets stuck: a missing field, a status that is misunderstood, a forgotten access right. Fix those points, then extend the method to your other suppliers as orders come in. If you have history to migrate or an approval workflow to define, our implementation service starts from how you work today rather than from an imposed template. To talk it over, describe your purchasing process to us: who orders, who receives, who pays, and where information gets lost today. That is enough to identify the first useful settings.