Every month a stack of supplier invoices lands at the office. The builders’ merchant. The ready-mix supplier. The roofing merchant. Someone keys them into the accounts system, and they get paid. Ask who checked those invoices against what actually turned up on site, and you get a familiar answer. A pause. Then: “the lads would say if something was wrong.”
They wouldn’t. Not because anyone is careless — because the evidence never reaches the person paying the bill.
Three pieces of paper that should agree
When you buy materials, three records come into existence. The order — what you asked for, and the price you agreed, even if the asking was a phone call from a van. The delivery ticket — the slip signed at the gate when the lorry arrives, saying what was actually dropped. And the invoice — what the supplier would like paying. Accountants call checking all three against each other a three-way match. In plain English: did we get what we ordered, and are we being charged what we agreed?
In most firms I audit, that match never happens. The order was placed by phone from site, so there’s no written record of the price. The ticket was signed by whoever was nearest the gate, then folded into a high-vis pocket or left on the dash of the van. The invoice arrives at the office three weeks later. The office has one document out of three. So the invoice gets keyed in on its own say-so, and paid.
What slips through
Small things, mostly. A load that arrived short, noticed at the time, mentioned to no one who pays bills. A price agreed at the trade counter that bears no relation to the list price on the invoice. Materials sent back to the merchant with a promise of a credit note — the supplier’s IOU, a document that cancels part of a bill — which then never arrives, and is never chased, because no one wrote down that it was owed. The same load invoiced twice under two reference numbers, both paid, because six weeks apart they didn’t look like twins.
None of this is dramatic and very little of it is dishonest. It’s what happens when the person who knows what arrived and the person who pays for it never see the same piece of paper.
Notice, too, that the errors only run one way. When did a supplier last ring you to say they’d overcharged?
Moving prices make it worse
Invoice-checking matters most when prices are on the move, because the gap between the price you agreed and the price you’re billed opens up faster. And prices are on the move. The government’s own materials price figures for the year to February had imported timber up more than seven per cent, with sand and gravel close behind, and the industry’s forecasters expect building costs to keep climbing for the next five years. When the price of a thing changes between the day you order it and the day you’re billed for it, the difference settles wherever nobody is checking.
A firm doing a few million a year in turnover can easily put a six-figure sum through the merchants in a year. You don’t need much of that to be wrong — short loads here, a stale price there, an unchased credit note or two — before it quietly outgrows what you spend on the office that processes it.
The fix is not a procurement platform
There is, of course, software sold for this. A procurement module. Purchase-order workflows, approval chains, supplier onboarding. I’ve watched firms buy one, and I’ve watched site teams stop raising orders within the month, because the workflow was slower than a phone call and the concrete was needed by Thursday. A control that site won’t use isn’t a control. It’s a decoration.
The broken part is small and specific: the ticket and the invoice never meet. So fix that, and only that. A photograph of the delivery ticket, taken at the gate, tied to the job — ten seconds, on the phone already in the site manager’s hand. When the invoice arrives, the office sees the tickets sitting beside it, line against line. Anything on the invoice with no ticket behind it gets flagged, not paid. And every credit note gets a status — promised, received, applied — so a merchant’s IOU can’t be quietly forgotten by both sides.
That’s the whole tool. It isn’t clever. It just makes sure two documents that describe the same lorry-load end up in the same place.
Where this doesn’t apply
Be honest about the other cases. If you’re small enough that one person places the orders, meets the lorries and pays the invoices, that person’s memory is the three-way match — don’t buy software to replace something that already works. If you’re labour-only and materials are a sliver of your spend, this isn’t your leak; your money goes missing in valuations and day rates, which is a different article. And if your deliveries are a handful a month, a habit of stapling tickets to invoices will do the job for free.
But if you’ve got three or four live sites, deliveries arriving daily, and an office that pays whatever the merchant sends because it has nothing to check against — you are guarding the gate and leaving month end wide open. Worth knowing which door the money actually leaves by.
If you’d like the gate and the office looking at the same piece of paper, get in touch.