I manage all the supply ordering for a mid-size company—roughly $150,000 annually across a handful of vendors. When I took over purchasing in 2020, we were still doing a lot by phone and email. The shift to online ordering wasn't just about convenience; our finance team was pushing for better tracking and fewer invoice discrepancies. Honestly, the transition had some bumps.
This checklist is for anyone in a similar spot: office administrators, procurement coordinators, or anyone tasked with moving their company's supply orders online. If you're looking at a new vendor portal or setting up a recurring order system, this will help you avoid the classic mistakes I made. It's basically a step-by-step of what to actually do, in order.
Here are the 7 steps I've landed on after 5 years of managing these relationships. It's not sexy, but it works.
Step 1: Check Your Company's Purchasing Policy First
Before you even log into a new vendor's site, pull out your company's purchasing policy. Seriously. I know it sounds boring, but skipping this step cost me a $2,400 headache in my first year. I found a great price from a new vendor, placed an order for 400 units, and they couldn't provide a proper invoice—handwritten receipt only. Finance rejected the expense report, and I ate the cost out of my department budget. Now I verify invoicing capability before placing any order.
What to check:
- Spending limits: Can you place orders up to a certain amount, or does it require manager approval?
- Approved vendor lists: Some companies require you to use pre-approved suppliers, even for small orders.
- Payment terms: Do you need Net 30 terms, or are you paying with a company credit card?
- Tax exemption status: Make sure your account is set up with your tax-exempt certificate from the start.
Knowing these rules upfront saves you from ordering something you can't actually pay for or get reimbursed for.
Step 2: Create a Master List of What You Actually Order
Don't just jump in and start adding items to your cart. Most online ordering systems allow you to create templates or favorites lists, but they're only useful if you know what you order most often.
I went back and forth between using the vendor's generic catalog and building my own list for about a month. The generic catalog was huge and confusing. Ultimately, I spent an afternoon pulling the last year's worth of orders and creating a spreadsheet of our top 50 items. This list became the basis for our online templates.
What to include:
- Item number (SKU)
- Description
- Quantity per order (monthly or quarterly)
- Price from your last order (to spot price changes)
- Preferred vendor
This step cut our ordering time from about 4 hours per month to under 90 minutes. It also helped us identify items we were over-ordering, which (honestly) happened more than I'd like to admit.
Step 3: Set Up User Permissions (The Right Way)
Here's a mistake I see a lot of people make: giving everyone with an account access to the company credit card. Or, conversely, making it so hard to order that people just go rogue and buy stuff on their own cards. Either way, it's a mess.
Recommended permission levels:
- Viewer: Can see product catalogs and pricing, but cannot place orders.
- Requester: Can add items to a cart and submit a request for approval.
- Approver: Can review and approve requests.
- Buyer: Can place and modify orders (usually the admin or purchaser).
- Administrator: Manages the account, user permissions, and billing info.
The key is to limit who can actually buy. In our company, only two people in the admin team have 'Buyer' access. Everyone else uses 'Requester.' This eliminated the problem of people ordering unauthorized items (and then asking why they couldn't).
Step 4: Configure Your Default Shipping and Billing Addresses
It sounds obvious, but incorrect address data is one of the most common reasons for delays and lost packages. When you first set up your account, verify that your default shipping and billing addresses are correct. Then—and this is the step most people skip—check if the system allows you to add multiple delivery addresses.
I process 60-80 orders annually, and a surprising number of them go to different locations. We have a main office and a warehouse about 10 miles away. When I first set up our account, I only added the main address. The warehouse orders kept getting sent to the wrong place, causing delays and frustrated colleagues.
Most vendor portals let you save multiple shipping profiles. Do this upfront. It takes 10 minutes and saves you hours of forwarding later. Also, if your company has locations in different states, make sure the sales tax setup is correct for each one. This is where getting your tax exemption set up properly (from Step 1) pays off.
Step 5: Set Up Invoice and Payment Integrations
If you've ever had to manually match a purchase order to an invoice to a credit card statement, you know this is where the real pain lives. The automated process eliminated the data entry errors we used to have, but only because we set it up correctly from the start.
I knew I should get written confirmation on the payment process, but thought 'we've worked together for years.' That was the one time the verbal agreement got forgotten. We placed a $3,000 order, and somehow the payment method got set to a credit card that wasn't authorized. The order was held for a week while we sorted it out.
What to set up:
- Link your purchase order numbers directly to the online system (many vendors allow automatic PO numbers).
- Set up a default payment method that matches your company's policy (credit card vs. ACH vs. Net 30).
- Configure invoice delivery: Do you want them emailed to finance, or downloadable from the portal? Decide before the first order.
- Check if the system can send you alerts when invoices are ready or due.
Switching to online ordering saved our accounting team about 6 hours monthly just in invoice matching. But it only worked because we aligned the workflow with finance's requirements before making the switch.
Step 6: Test the Ordering and Approval Workflow
Don't go live with your online ordering system without a dry run. I learned this lesson the hard way when we shipped 1,000 items with a typo in the contact information. But even before that, we had issues with the approval routing not working correctly.
Place a small test order—something under $100—and run it through the entire workflow: request, approve, purchase, receive, and pay. This is how you find out if:
- Approval emails actually reach the right people.
- Requesters can see their order history.
- PO numbers generate correctly.
- The delivery address shows up right.
- Finance can access the invoice.
In my first year, I made the classic rookie mistake: I set up the workflow, assumed it worked, and approved a $600 order. The approval email went to a manager who had left the company three weeks prior. Nobody caught it until the order arrived for a 'conference room run by a ghost.' Now I always do a test run and check the approval routing list quarterly.
Step 7: Train Your Internal Customers (Succinctly)
This is the step that gets skipped most often, and it's why online ordering initiatives fail. You can build the perfect portal, but if your colleagues don't know how to use it, they'll just email you their requests anyway. The 'system' becomes you, not the software.
How to approach training:
- Create a one-page guide (no one reads manuals). Include screenshots of the critical buttons.
- Hold a 15-minute lunch-and-learn. Focus on the most common actions: 'How to request' and 'How to check order status.'
- Send a recurring reminder email with links and a 2-minute video showing the process.
- Have a 'cheat sheet' for what to do when something goes wrong (i.e., who to email, what info to include).
I knew I should get buy-in from the team, but thought 'they'll figure it out.' Well, the odds caught up with me when my inbox was flooded with 'Can you just order it for me?' emails. Now, I frame the online system as a benefit: 'You can see prices instantly, choose delivery dates, and track your own orders.' The adoption rate improved significantly after that.
What Most People Forget
Here are the common pitfalls that can trip up even the best-intentioned admin:
Pitfall 1: Forgetting to update payment methods and pricing agreements. Your company probably has negotiated pricing with key vendors. Make sure this pricing is reflected in your online account. Otherwise, you'll be charged the standard rate and have to go through a time-consuming process to get it corrected. Check your first invoice carefully.
Pitfall 2: Not archiving the 'old way.' For at least the first month, keep a copy of your phone/email order process. I kept my old spreadsheet for three months after we went live. That backup saved me when a portal glitch deleted a pending order. We lost a few hours, but not the entire order.
Pitfall 3: Assuming the portal is intuitive for everyone. The vendor failure in March 2023 changed how I think about training. One critical deadline missed because a new hire didn't know how to use the portal—and they were too embarrassed to ask. Now, every new employee gets a quick, 2-minute walkthrough from our admin team. It's a small investment that prevents major disruptions.
Pitfall 4: Skipping the final review (surprise, surprise). Like most beginners, I skipped the final review of our order workflow because 'it's basically the same as last time.' It wasn't. A system update had changed a default setting, and we ended up with a $400 duplicate order. Now I always do a quick sanity check on the final cart before hitting 'submit.'
Setting up online ordering is a classic case where the upfront investment pays off exponentially. The total cost of ownership (i.e., not just the software price but the time spent fixing mistakes) is lower when you do it right the first time. Take these steps, test everything, and you'll save yourself—and your company—a lot of headaches.
