In this video, Sachin Sharma, founder of ProcureDesk, explains how duplicate purchase orders (POs) waste money and cause operational headaches for growing companies. He shares a real‑world example of a 200‑person construction firm that incurred $20,000 in restocking fees due to duplicate orders. Sharma identifies three primary causes: (1) reliance on spreadsheets that aren’t consistently updated, leading to untracked orders; (2) long or opaque approval processes that hide pending requisitions, prompting staff to create new POs; and (3) missing vendor acknowledgments, which cause teams to place backup orders that later become redundant. He quantifies the financial impact of these errors and then recommends a solution—centralizing the purchasing function with an all‑in‑one purchasing system that provides visibility, control, and vendor communication. The video ends with a call‑to‑action to schedule a demo with ProcureDesk specialists to reduce duplicate orders.
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Are you struggling with duplicate purchase orders? If you are, this video is for you. I was recently talking to a controller of a 200 people company. They are into construction and they are continuously dealing with duplicate orders. What that means you gotta now return the product, pay restocking fee and I think in a month they itself paid around 20,000 in restocking fee because they ordered duplicate parked and they did not need it for any projects going forward. So in this video I'm going to break down first of all what is causing the duplicate orders. And number two is what you can do to stop the duplicate orders process. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of Procuredesk where we help growing companies automate their purchasing and AP processes. So let's talk about what is creating duplicate orders. So number one issue is spreadsheets. Every growing company that does not have a centralized purchasing system use spreadsheets for tracking purchase orders. Every time somebody goes place the order, the order is updated in a spreadsheet. But once in a while it happens that people forget to update the spreadsheet. So guess what? Nobody knows that the material was ordered. Another person goes in, tries to, you know, order the material, realize it's not ordered, they just issue a new purchase order, right? So now you have a duplicate order. So that's kind of number one. Number two is approval delays or long approval process. A lot of times organizations don't have visibility into the approval process. Hey, I sent a request for material, is this approved? Where is this waiting on? Do I need to follow up? And so on. A lot of times people see that and since they don't have visibility, they'll just go and create another order. I'll give you a real example. We see this every time with biotech companies. You have multiple scientists working in the lab and you're out of, let's say pivots. One person orders it, it is waiting for approval. The other person goes in, realize there are no pivots, they have no visibility that the requisition is waiting for approval. They just go and order another one, right? As for them, they're doing the right thing and that is correct. They don't have any visibility. So it's lack of systems. So that's number two. Number three is missing. Vendor acknowledgment. A lot of times what happens is when you order a product, you should ask the vendor to acknowledge whether they can deliver it or not. And a lot of times you send the PO out and it goes in the black hole, right? And you need the product now. So what you do, you order it from another vendor who says, oh, I can give it to you now. So now you have two purchase orders. You got the material, but then you forgot to cancel the other purchase order. Guess what? Now it ships. And now you gotta return it if you're not gonna use it and pay restocking fee. So having the vendors acknowledge the purchase orders goes a long way because then you know that they received it, they can deliver when you need it. Or if you need to change the dates or cancel the purchase order, you can do it more proactively. So these are the three simple reasons why you have duplicate purchase orders. So, so how do you go about solving it? The way to solve this is centralizing the process. Either centralize how many people can make the purchase or have a all in one purchasing system where everybody can see what is ordered, where it is spending, and so on. So you can easily track what is ordered and avoid these duplicates going forward. If you like this video and you're struggling with duplicate orders, go ahead and click the link below and schedule a time with one of our product specialists so we can walk you through how, using a system like brokers, you can reduce these duplicate orders. Thanks for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
