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The purchase order process is how a dental practice or DSO requests, approves, and pays for supplies. It starts when a PO is created and sent to the supplier. When the order arrives, it’s matched against the PO to confirm receipt, then matched against the invoice to confirm accurate payment.
Many dental practices and DSOs have multiple ways they are ordering supplies, sometimes with different ones being used in the same week.
A hygienist logs into a supplier's site and buys the cheapest option that day if they needed inventory. An office manager calls in a rush request so a procedure doesn’t get rescheduled. A rep might even stop by in person to check in and take a verbal order. Unfortunately, none of that happens inside a purchase order process, so none of it leaves a record anyone can check later.
So when the invoice shows up weeks later, you’re left asking these questions:
Did you actually order what's on this invoice, at the price you agreed to?
This page covers what a purchase order needs to hold up, the steps that turn a request into a controlled purchase, and where automation and three-way matching fit once the paperwork moves off someone's desk.
A purchase order is a document a buyer issues to a vendor that documents intent to purchase specific products or services, at a specific price, before any money changes hands. Once the vendor accepts it, typically by sending an order acknowledgment, the purchase order becomes a legally binding agreement, and both sides have a record of what was promised.
The exact fields vary by practice, but a purchase order that actually functions as a control document generally includes:
Description of the product or service being requested
If the purchase order doesn’t have any of these fields, it’s not doing its job. If anything is missing, you miss out on an opportunity to verify that the money the supplier is charging is indeed the money owed. For instance, if you’re missing a SKU, that could mean the wrong item showed up, and nobody noticed. So now, you’re paying for supplies you didn’t even need.
A purchase order and an invoice can look nearly identical on the page, but they run in opposite directions. The buyer creates the purchase order to document intent to buy. The vendor creates the invoice to bill for what was delivered. That distinction matters at the point of payment: the only way to know an invoice is accurate is to have a purchase order to check it against. Without one, accounts payable is paying on the vendor's word alone.
A purchase request is the internal step before a purchase order ever reaches a supplier, typically submitted to finance or a designated manager for approval, carrying the same details a purchase order would: what's needed, how much, and roughly what it should cost. Once approved, the request becomes a purchase order and goes out to the vendor. Skipping this step is how maverick spend gets into a practice's books.
A purchase order doesn't exist in isolation. It's one stage in the dental procurement lifecycle, sitting between the decision to buy and the moment supplies actually show up. Here's the purchase order process flow once you break it into steps a practice or DSO can follow and enforce.
Prices for the same dental supply can vary widely across suppliers, and not checking is money left on the table. Without a way to compare in one place, staff default to whichever supplier is fastest to search. To prevent overspending on purchase orders, enable your team to compare prices on supplies across suppliers. Doing so ensures that your team pays the least for what they need.
A purchase order that ignores budget or approval rules just documents overspend instead of preventing it. Setting spend limits, preferred supplier lists, and category budgets before staff submits a request keeps purchases inside what the practice or DSO can afford, letting the limits enforce policy instead of someone remembering it.
Manual entry is where most purchase order mistakes start. A mistyped SKU, a rounding error on quantity, a unit price copied from an old order can all slip through unnoticed. Scanning barcodes or custom QR codes that are supplier agnostic instead of typing product details removes the most common source of those mistakes, and getting the quantity right the first time avoids partial deliveries and resent orders.
Once a request has a price, a quantity, and a supplier attached, it needs sign-off from whoever owns that budget. A flexible approval step, one that lets a manager approve part of a request and decline the rest, keeps legitimate purchases moving without forcing an all-or-nothing decision. Once approved, the purchase order goes to the supplier, and both sides have a document to hold each other accountable to.
A completed purchase order for a dental practice looks something like this, built for a routine order of composite and gloves.
PO number: PO-10482
Vendor: [Supplier name]
Ship to: [Practice location and address]
Item: Universal composite, A2 shade, 4g syringe
Quantity: 12 syringes
Unit price: $18.50
Total: $222.00
Requested delivery: Within 5 business days
Payment terms: Net 30
Every line in that example ties back to something accounts payable can verify later such as: the quantity against what's received, the unit price against what's invoiced, and the vendor against who actually shipped it. A purchase order missing any of those fields still gets supplies to the practice. It just stops being useful the moment someone needs to check and verify the bill.
A practice rarely decides outright to stop using purchase orders. It happens gradually: a rep visit turns into a verbal order because the item was needed the same day, a phone call replaces the request form because the office manager already knows the rep, or a website cart gets used because logging a formal request takes longer than clicking buy. Each shortcut looks harmless by itselft. Together, they leave a practice with no baseline to check any invoice against.
When an order goes straight from a rep visit or supplier portal to the practice's shelves, there's no document recording what price was agreed to. If a supplier raises prices without notice, nobody catches it. Benchmarking data puts the cost of processing a single purchase order at roughly $14 to more than $54, a gap driven mostly by how consistently the process gets followed. Skipping the purchase order doesn't remove that cost. It moves it from processing time to unchecked overspend.
A trusted rep relationship is valuable, but if that rep can take an order directly with no purchase request behind it, the approval steps your practice built get bypassed every time. The rep isn't doing anything wrong by taking the order. The problem is that convenience and control pull in different directions, and convenience usually wins unless the purchase order is the easier path.
Without a dollar threshold that routes bigger purchases to a manager, a $40 supply reorder and a $4,000 equipment order move through the same open door. That flat structure either slows down every small purchase or lets big purchases through with the same rubber stamp as routine restocking.
When accounts payable gets an invoice, and there's no purchase order on file, the practical choice is usually to pay it as billed. Disputing a bill takes time and proof, and without a purchase order, there's nothing to point to. Purchasing controls close this gap by requiring every invoice to have a matching purchase order before it clears for payment.
If your practice or group is still catching these gaps after the invoice arrives, a demo of Method's spend management platform can show you what it looks like to catch them before the order ever goes out. Schedule a demo.
Three-way matching is the check that happens right before a supplier gets paid: the purchase order, the receiving record, and the invoice all have to agree before accounts payable releases funds. If the quantity on the invoice doesn't match what was actually received, or the price doesn't match what was ordered, the match fails, and the invoice gets flagged instead of paid automatically.
Each of the three documents anwer a different question:
Take away the purchase order and the other two documents have nothing to check against. A receiving record without one confirms delivery, not price. An invoice without one confirms a bill, not accuracy.
The average invoice exception rate across accounts payable teams landed around 14 percent, against roughly 9 percent for the best-performing teams, exactly what three-way matching is built to catch. On the fraud side, estimates say that organizations lose about 5 percent of annual revenue to fraud, with a median loss of $104,000 per case. A purchase order that doesn’t get checked against is exactly that kind of gap.
Setting up three-way invoice matching inside your procurement platform turns this from a manual reconciliation task into something that happens automatically on every order.
Purchase order automation applies to the same steps already covered on this page: request, approval, sending, receiving, and matching. What changes is who, or what, does the work at each step.
Instead of a request sitting until a manager opens their email, automated approval routing sends it directly to whoever owns that budget and flags it if it sits too long- the difference between an approval taking minutes and one taking days.
Automation can check a request against remaining budget before it's submitted, instead of after the money is committed, catching an overspend before it happens instead of explaining it at month-end.
Once a request clears approval, the system creates the purchase order and sends it to the supplier without anyone re-entering the same details twice. That's also where building supply orders drops from hours of manual entry to minutes of review.
Rather than every invoice waiting in the same pile, automation flags only the ones that don't match on quantity, price, or vendor, so accounts payable spends its time on exceptions instead of re-checking orders that already matched.
For a DSO running this across several locations, purchase order software built for multi-location groups is what makes these checks consistent at every site, instead of dependent on whoever happens to be managing that location's orders.
A purchase order is the only document in this chain created before any money is committed. Treat it as paperwork, and every step after it, receiving, invoice matching, payment, is checking against nothing.
Method builds these controls into the ordering process itself: approval routing, three-way matching, and AP automation that only releases payment once a purchase order, receiving record, and invoice actually agree. If you want to see what that looks like against your own purchasing volume, schedule a demo.
