PO Acknowledgement & Confirmation Tracker
Capture supplier acknowledgements against your open POs, flag the ones nobody confirmed, and catch changed price, quantity, or ship date before it bites you — with a buyer approving every change.
A private web tool that imports your open POs, captures supplier acks, compares them to the original, flags price/qty/date mismatches, makes a buyer approve any change, and exports an updated PO status file plus a chase list for everything still unconfirmed.
Before you start
- A list of open purchase orders you can export to CSV or a Google Sheet
- Supplier acknowledgement/confirmation data (emails, PDFs, or a sheet you can type into)
- Free Vercel, Supabase, and Resend accounts (the plan walks you through them)
The problem this kills
You send a purchase order. Then... silence. Did the supplier actually accept it? Did they quietly bump the price, cut the quantity, or push the ship date two weeks? You usually find out when the truck shows up — or doesn't.
Right now that confirmation lives in a forwarded email, a PDF nobody opened, or a buyer's memory. Nothing systematically checks "did the acknowledgement match what we ordered?" So unconfirmed POs slip through, surprise changes land at receiving, and your vendor scorecards are guesswork.
This tool closes that gap. Every open PO gets tracked until a supplier acknowledges it, every acknowledgement gets compared to the original line by line, and any deviation gets parked for a buyer to approve before your records change. Nothing ships unconfirmed, and nothing arrives surprising.
What you'll build
A private, login-protected web app for your purchasing team that:
- Imports your open POs from a CSV or Google Sheet — PO number, supplier, line items, quantity, unit price, and promised ship date.
- Captures supplier acknowledgements — typed in, pasted from a confirmation email, or uploaded — and matches each ack to its PO.
- Compares ack vs. original automatically and flags the three deviations that hurt: changed price, changed quantity, changed ship date.
- Routes every deviation to a buyer who reviews and approves (or rejects) the change before any PO record is updated to match. The AI drafts; a human decides.
- Builds your chase list — every PO unconfirmed past your threshold (say, 3 business days) — and can email a nudge.
- Records every deviation for vendor scorecards, so "this supplier confirms late and changes dates" becomes a fact, not a feeling.
- Exports a clean CSV of updated PO statuses and the chase list, in the exact columns your ERP or system of record expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
A single markdown file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It builds the whole tool with you, step by step — you don't write code, you answer questions and paste prompts.
It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before any building, the plan makes the agent ask how your POs and acknowledgements actually work — your PO numbering, your line-item fields, how suppliers confirm today, what counts as "unconfirmed," how big a price or date change you tolerate, and your messy exceptions (partial acks, split shipments, blanket POs). Then it reads a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up. You get a tool shaped to your process, not a generic template.
Inside you'll find:
- The discovery interview (8–12 targeted questions) and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
- A step-by-step build: database, PO import, acknowledgement capture, the comparison/deviation engine, the buyer approval gate, alerts, and CSV export.
- Ready-to-copy prompts at the end of every step — paste, review, move on.
- A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build the whole thing today from sheets, even with zero ERP integration.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a toy. The plan bakes in the controls a purchasing team actually needs:
- Login so only your team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own POs and suppliers.
- A complete audit trail — who imported what, who approved which change, and exactly when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — the AI flags a price/qty/date deviation and drafts the updated PO, but nothing is written to your system of record until a buyer approves it.
- Duplicate guards — the same PO + acknowledgement can't be processed twice, so a re-forwarded confirmation never double-updates a record.
Who it's for
Buyers and purchasing coordinators who live in open-PO spreadsheets and supplier email threads — and who are tired of finding out about a changed ship date at the receiving dock. If you can keep a PO tracker in a sheet, you can build and run this.
You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your business.