Inside the purchasing inbox
Everything from suppliers lands in purchasing@ or orders@. Order acknowledgements, delivery notes, price change notices, 'we are out of stock until next month', invoices, marketing, and the occasional supplier who replies to a thread from last year about something else.
Three people have access. Each assumes someone else read the email about the delayed delivery. The first anyone knows about it is when the job team is waiting for materials that have not arrived and a customer is on the phone.
Flags, folders and colour categories have been tried. They work until someone is busy.
Why a shared inbox hides the important email
An inbox treats every email as equal. A confirmation that changes nothing looks just like a notice that pushes a delivery back and puts a job at risk. The difference only becomes clear when someone reads it and connects it to the order it is about, and that connection is where the process breaks.
Suppliers do not help. Order numbers appear in the subject, the body, an attached PDF, or not at all. Some quote your PO number, some their own reference, some just the product. Matching them by hand needs someone who knows the orders well.
And shared ownership is really no ownership. Unless a specific person is responsible for a specific email, the default outcome is that everyone reads it and nobody acts.
What gets missed
- Delivery date changes that are not passed to the team or the customer.
- Price increases that reach the invoice before anyone agreed them.
- Part shipments or substitutions that nobody checks against the order.
- Order acknowledgements never received, so an order may not have been placed at all.
- Time spent reading every email to find the few that matter.
The unacknowledged order is the one that bites hardest. Nobody notices an email that did not arrive.
How we connect the inbox to your orders
- Connect to the shared mailbox in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace through its API.
- Classify each incoming email: order acknowledgement, delivery or dispatch notice, price change, stock issue, invoice, query, or not relevant.
- Extract the key details from the email and any attachments using AI document extraction: order references, products, quantities, dates, prices.
- Match each email to its purchase order in your purchasing, ERP or accounts system, using references where present and supplier, product and quantity where they are not.
- Compare what the supplier says with what the order says. If nothing has changed, file it against the order automatically.
- If something has changed, such as a new date, a new price or a short shipment, update the expected date on the order and create a task for the right person, with the affected jobs or customer orders listed.
- Watch for silence: raise an alert if an order has not been acknowledged or a delivery has not been confirmed by the date you set.
- Pass invoices on to your accounts process, matched to the order and delivery.
| Email type | What happens |
|---|---|
| Acknowledgement, matches the order | Filed against the order, no action |
| Delivery date moved | Order updated, owner notified with affected jobs |
| Price differs from order | Held for approval before the invoice is accepted |
| Cannot be matched | Queued for a person with a suggested match |
| Marketing or irrelevant | Filed out of the way |
An inbox that sorts itself
The shared inbox stops being the place people go to find out what is happening. Each purchase order carries its own history of supplier communication, and the people who need to act get a task, not a hope that they saw the email.
Delays are known about when the supplier says so, not when the goods fail to arrive. Price changes are agreed before they are paid. And the inbox itself becomes something people can clear rather than dread.
Over time you also build a record of how each supplier actually behaves: how often they acknowledge promptly, how often dates move, how often prices change between order and invoice. That is useful evidence the next time you review who you buy from.
Does this describe your purchasing inbox?
- Supplier emails arrive in a shared inbox several people can see.
- You have been caught out by a delivery change that was emailed but missed.
- Price changes sometimes appear first on the invoice.
- Matching supplier emails to orders needs someone who knows the orders.
- You do not know which orders have never been acknowledged.