Stopping buyers approving their own purchase orders
How a manufacturer separates raising and approving purchases, from requisition and quotations to an order the buyer cannot approve, and its limits.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Manufacturing businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
In a factory, the buyer is one of the most trusted people in the building. They know which steel supplier delivers on time, which resin batch caused the reject run last year, and which packaging firm will rush an order on a Friday. That knowledge is exactly why the purchasing desk is where fraud most often hides. A buyer who can choose the supplier, raise the order and approve it can also favour a friend's company, split orders to stay under the radar, or order goods that never reach the plant.
None of that requires a dishonest buyer to start with. It requires a process where one person can do every step. This article covers how to split those steps in Achekam so that the person who raises a purchase is never the person who approves it, and what still has to be handled outside the system.
The fraud risk in purchasing
Manufacturing purchasing has its own warning signs:
- the same supplier winning every quote for a raw material, at prices that drift upward;
- a supplier whose contact or bank details match an employee's;
- many orders just below an approval limit;
- invoices for quantities the stores never received;
- "emergency" purchases that skip quotations, again and again.
The control that blocks most of these is simple: split the work so that no single person can commit the business to spend and also sign off that commitment. AccountingTools' definition of segregation of duties explains the idea of assigning the steps in a process to different people so that no one can both commit and conceal theft or error.
Requisition, quotation, order
Achekam's procurement follows the order a well-run factory buys in.
Requisition. Staff raise a purchase requisition saying what is needed, why, and the estimated cost. A production supervisor asking for a replacement gearbox writes down which line it is for and roughly what it should cost. Someone other than the requester approves or declines it.
Quotations. Supplier quotations are captured against the approved requisition, and one is selected. If the chosen quotation is not the cheapest, the system requires a written reason, and keeps it. A quotation can also be disqualified with a reason, for example a supplier who cannot meet the material specification or the delivery date.
Order. The purchase order is raised from the selected quotation of an approved requisition. It is built on what came before it: an approved need and a chosen quote.
That chain means every order can be traced back to a person who asked for it, a person who approved the need, and the quotes that were compared.
The person who raised it cannot approve it
The decisive rule sits at the order. In Achekam, the person who raised a purchase order cannot approve it. The buyer can do all the legwork of turning a chosen quotation into an order, but a second person must approve before it stands.
For that rule to mean anything, the approver must be someone with the knowledge and authority to challenge the order. Good choices:
| Order | Sensible approver |
|---|---|
| Raw materials on a standing supplier | Production or operations manager |
| Capital equipment or tooling | Financial manager or a director |
| Services and maintenance contracts | The manager of the area that uses them |
| Anything raised by the approver's own team lead | Someone outside that line |
Role permissions in Settings (Permissions & RBAC) allow or deny what each role may do, and let you check why a member may or may not act. Use them to make sure buyers hold the right to raise orders and approvers the right to approve, and review that set-up whenever someone changes job.
Small factories sometimes worry they do not have enough people for this. Even with three people in the office, the owner approving the buyer's orders is a real control. What matters is that the buyer cannot approve alone.
Cancelling with a reason
Orders do get cancelled: a customer changes a specification, a machine breakdown changes priorities, a supplier cannot deliver. In Achekam, an approved order can be cancelled with a reason, and the reason is kept.
Read those reasons occasionally. A pattern of orders cancelled with one supplier and re-raised with another, or of cancellations shortly after approval, is worth a conversation.
A purchase, in words
The maintenance supervisor raises a requisition for bearings for a filling line, with an estimated cost. The plant manager approves it. The buyer captures three supplier quotations and selects the second-cheapest because the cheapest cannot deliver within the week, writing that reason down. The buyer raises the order from that quotation; the plant manager, not the buyer, approves it. When the line is later stopped for a different fault, the order is cancelled with a note explaining why, and that note stays with the order.
Getting the order to the supplier
There is a limit to plan around. A purchase order cannot yet be sent to the supplier from any screen in Achekam, although the server can produce its PDF. So the last step, actually telling the supplier, happens outside the system for now.
Make that step part of the control rather than a weak point:
- send orders only after approval, never on the strength of a draft;
- send from a shared purchasing mailbox, not a personal one, so orders can be seen by others;
- quote the order number in the e-mail and ask the supplier to put it on the invoice and delivery note.
The order number on the supplier's documents is what lets deliveries and invoices be matched back to an approved order later. The same requisition-to-order path for a building site is described in materials requisitions and purchase orders, and the way a non-profit evidences its supplier choices for funders in showing funders why you chose each supplier.
Where to start
Write down who may raise requisitions, who approves them, who buys and who approves orders, and set the role permissions to match. Then pull the last quarter's purchases and check how many would have passed the new rules; the exceptions show you where the old process leaked.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
