It’s the 28th, and you ask what has actually arrived this month. Purchasing points to the order schedule. The warehouse has delivery notes. Your finance team has invoices for some shipments and no paperwork for others. But the cash forecast is still due.
Supply chain visibility for finance teams has to help you explain the stock balance and the payments ahead. If the warehouse, purchasing team, and accounts each hold part of the answer, someone has to piece it together before you can sign off the figures. Start with the records behind those figures and find out where the information stops reaching finance.
What Does Supply Chain Visibility Mean for Finance Teams?
Supply chain visibility lets finance trace a purchase from the approved order to payment, including what happens to the goods along the way. You need to see which quantities are still due, what has arrived, and whether the records include the costs you expect. A delivery update should lead you to the relevant order and receipt. If your team has to collect several people’s spreadsheets to explain a stock balance, that connection is missing.
The Financial Cost of Late Supply Chain Records
The same purchase appears in your cash forecast, margin report, and month-end accounts. Each needs different information, so a missing receipt or late freight invoice can affect more than one set of figures.
Cash commitments before the invoice arrives
An approved order can commit future cash well before a supplier sends an invoice. If your forecast starts with accounts payable alone, it can miss deposits, staged payments, and orders awaiting delivery. A delayed shipment can also postpone the sale you expected to fund the supplier payment.
Review open orders alongside unpaid invoices, using the agreed payment terms and latest delivery dates. Reconcile the two so you count each expected payment once. That shows which payments you need to allow for before approving another stock purchase.
Stock costs and the margin you report
A supplier’s price doesn’t always show the full cost of bringing goods into stock. Freight and import duty can arrive on separate invoices, after you’ve prepared the first margin report. Leaving those charges out of stock costing can mean correcting the report later.
For businesses reporting under IFRS, the IFRS Foundation’s IAS 2 summary includes purchase costs and other costs incurred in bringing inventory to its present location and condition. Apply your accounting policy consistently and follow up charges you expect but haven’t received. That makes a margin movement easier to explain before purchasing or sales acts on it.
Cut-off and the evidence behind the balance
Suppose a delivery arrives on 30 September and someone enters it on 2 October. The two-day delay tells you how long the recording took. You still need to check which accounting period the transaction belongs in and whether the entry uses that period. A short delay can still create a cut-off problem.
For goods in transit, use the contract and your recognition policy to decide when to record the purchase. The International Chamber of Commerce explains that Incoterms allocate responsibilities, costs, and risk; they don’t determine the transfer of ownership. Knowing that a shipment has left the supplier is one part of the evidence you need for that decision.
Which Supply Chain Records Should Finance Be Able to Trace?
Follow the paperwork for a purchase through purchasing, the warehouse, and accounts. Check who records changes at each stage and how finance receives them.
Orders and changes to delivery dates
Keep the approved order and its payment terms accessible, including any later changes to quantities or prices. When a buyer revises a delivery date, the person updating the cash forecast needs that change too. Otherwise, finance can still be planning a payment against the old schedule.
Receipts, shortages, and returns
The receipt should show what actually arrived, including partial deliveries and damaged or rejected goods. Match that information to the order so an outstanding quantity remains visible. Where your workflow uses goods received not invoiced, review that balance for receipts awaiting invoices and old items that need investigation.
Returns need a follow-up after the goods leave the warehouse. Record which supplier credits are outstanding and who is chasing them. Sending the goods back doesn’t settle the balance on its own.
Invoices and supporting costs
Link supplier invoices and relevant freight or duty records to the purchase they relate to. For imports, agree how the customs agent supplies declarations and supporting documents. A clearance update tells you about the shipment; finance still needs the records behind the costs and accounting entries.
Your team should be able to explain the stock balance without rebuilding the shipment history every month.
How Sage Intacct Connects Supply Chain Activity With Finance
Your Sage Intacct set-up needs to cover the purchase workflow and stock records, including any information coming from a separate warehouse system. Agree which modules and connections you need, and how finance will trace changes to the entries.
Linked orders, receipts, and invoices
Sage Intacct’s Purchasing documentation describes a workflow that links purchase orders with receipts and supplier invoices. Your team moves the purchase to its next stage by converting the existing transaction. This carries information through the workflow with less rekeying.
Sage’s inventory workflow guidance explains how transaction definitions control changes to stock quantities and values, including the general ledger postings. Configure the receipt and invoice stages around how your business accounts for stock and uninvoiced receipts. That brings the financial update into the purchasing process and reduces the need for a separate month-end rebuild.
Stock status across warehouses
With an Inventory Control subscription, Sage Intacct connects stock movements with Purchasing, Order Entry, and the accounting applications. Its Inventory Status report shows quantities on order, on hand, reserved, and available by warehouse. Sage’s documentation also explains that the calculation of available stock depends on your configuration.
For transfers between your own warehouses, an in-transit workflow records goods after dispatch and before receipt. During the move, they sit outside both warehouses’ on-hand quantities. This distinguishes stock still moving between sites from stock already received. Supplier shipments need their own agreed workflow or connection; this warehouse transfer feature covers internal movements.
Connections to your warehouse system
If your warehouse already records receipts in a specialist system, a connection can pass the relevant data into finance. Sage Intacct’s developer documentation supports creating and querying purchasing transactions through its API. The integration must map the source records to the right transaction types, references, and dates.
But the connection also needs a way to flag failed transfers. Assign someone to investigate them and confirm that corrected transactions reach finance. Otherwise, a receipt can remain in the warehouse system while accounts has no record of it.
A record of who changed what
Sage’s audit trail documentation states that the system records user IDs and timestamps when someone creates, changes, or deletes a record. That helps your team investigate when someone entered or amended a transaction. You can review those actions through Audit History reports, with the relevant reporting subscription and permissions.
Read that history alongside the source document and check the transaction’s status and accounting date. A creation timestamp tells you when someone created the record. You still need evidence of when the goods arrived and confirmation that the transaction posted to the ledger.
How to Find the Gaps in Your Current Process
Use a small sample from your last close to follow the records into finance. Include transactions either side of month-end and at least one awkward purchase, such as a partial delivery or an invoice that arrived before the goods.
Follow each purchase from its source
Start with delivery notes or warehouse records as well as entries already in the finance system. A ledger-only sample can miss receipts that nobody has entered. For each purchase, trace the order, physical movement, invoice, and related accounting entry. Record where you need to ask another person for the next document.
Separate the dates you’re testing
Record the physical event date, when the business received the evidence, when someone entered the transaction, and its accounting date. Check posting status too. For the September delivery example, these dates help locate the delay: did the warehouse record it late, did the paperwork reach finance late, or was the entry waiting to be processed?
Use the time between receipt and system entry as a working measure of recording delay. Review it alongside transaction value and period-end corrections, and look for receipts with no entry at all. Investigate high-value omissions near month-end even if you’ve found longer delays elsewhere.
Assign the first correction
Choose one recurring cause and put someone in charge of correcting it. If the warehouse books receipts in batches at the end of the week, agree a daily recording process. If transactions fail between systems, assign someone to review the failures. Check the same type of transaction at the next close to see whether the change worked.
Use a Recent Purchase to Review Your Finance System
Choose a purchase that took too long to reconcile last month. Bring its order, receipt, invoice, and any separate costs to the review. Ask your team to show how each stage reaches the accounts and where they have to intervene.
If finance has to repeat those checks for purchase after purchase, Sage Intacct can connect the purchasing and inventory records to the accounts. Bring that example to a discovery session with us. We can work through where the records stop matching and how to set up the system around the entries your team needs.
References
- IFRS Foundation, IAS 2 Inventories
- International Chamber of Commerce, Introduction to Incoterms 2020
- Sage Intacct help, About Purchasing transactions
- Sage Intacct help, Best practices for transaction workflows that impact inventory
- Sage Intacct help, About Inventory Control
- Sage Intacct help, Inventory Status report
- Sage Intacct help, Create an in-transit warehouse transfer
- Sage Intacct developer documentation, Purchasing Transactions
- Sage Intacct help, Audit trails
- Sage Intacct help, Use an Audit History report
