Ask what the status is measuring
“Open” can mean an order has not been fully received, a balance is unresolved, or a workflow step is incomplete. A team needs agreed meanings before it can use status labels to prioritize work. Confirm whether a screen reports ordering, receiving or another process.
Create a follow-up view with order number, supplier, SKU, ordered units, received units, remaining units, promised date and owner. Include a short exception note when relevant. Keep the original promised date if you want to understand slippage, alongside the supplier's current date. Replacing one date with another without context erases the history the purchasing team needs.
Triage by the decision required
A practical daily review can separate four groups: confirmation missing, receipt due, delivery late, and discrepancy unresolved. These are suggested working categories, not claims about any vendor's exact status names. Each group should lead to an action.
For a fictional order of 80 bottles, 60 have arrived and 20 remain. The supplier has acknowledged the balance but not given a date. Calling the order “mostly received” hides the useful next step: obtain a date for those 20 or decide on another supply path. If no downstream work depends on them, it may be a lower priority than a smaller shortage that blocks tomorrow's dispatch.
Use reports as a starting view
InFlow lists a Purchase Order Status report alongside purchase summaries and purchase details. Its reports can support a purchasing review, but the presence of a report does not establish that supplier promises or local follow-up notes have been entered correctly. Inspect the selected fields and filters before relying on a saved view.
Choose a handful of open orders and reconcile them with their receipt records. Check for duplicates, orders that were cancelled outside the system, and goods received against an unexpected reference. A status review is especially useful after someone covers another person's role: the unresolved work should remain visible even when the original buyer is absent.
Make the review end in a handoff
Every exception needs a named owner and a next action that can be observed: request confirmation, count an arrival, verify a replacement, or close an agreed cancellation. “Chase supplier” is less useful than “confirm delivery date for the remaining 20 units before Thursday's allocation decision.”
Do not close old lines simply to shorten the report. Investigate first, and keep a record of why a balance was removed. Conversely, do not leave a completed order open because nobody owns the final check. At low volume, a disciplined shared list may be enough. More orders and multiple receiving locations increase the value of linked records. Begin with a ten-minute review of the oldest and most consequential open lines; judge success by resolved decisions, not by an empty report.
Sources used for this page
These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.
- inFlow: purchasing reports — Merchant documentation · inflowinventory.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-24