Multi-unit restaurant purchasing that holds the contract price on every delivery

It gives every unit the same buying process and gives head office one view of it. In Bollard, a head chef raises a kitchen order from the items approved for that unit, with quantities and a required date. Bollard estimates the total from item-master costs and shows the approval route before the order is sent.

Orders inside the unit's limit go to the unit manager. Larger ones carry on to the district manager. Approved orders become purchase orders that carry the agreed price, terms and delivery unit, and the PDF goes straight to the supplier.

Contract caterers use the same structure with each client site set up as a unit, so a site's spend stays coded to its own budget.

You stop it by checking every invoice line against the price on the order before payment. Produce prices move weekly, and a few cents over contract on lettuce, herbs or citrus rarely gets noticed when someone glances at an invoice total.

Bollard records the contract price on the purchase order. When the invoice is entered, it is compared with the PO's prices and the receipt's accepted quantities, line by line. A padded price fails the match on value, and payment can only be raised against a matched invoice. The rule is enforced in the database, so no one can click past it.

When an invoice does fail, the line-level match tells finance which line caused the exception.

They are recorded as rejected on the delivery and never become billable. Whoever takes the delivery records received, accepted and rejected quantities against each line of the purchase order. A case of wilted romaine hearts goes back on the van and onto the record at the same moment.

When the supplier's invoice arrives with the full case still on it, the three-way match excludes the rejected quantity automatically and the line fails on quantity. Short deliveries work the same way. The order stays open with its balance until the rest turns up or the order is closed.

Each unit holds its own par levels, and Bollard flags a shortfall when stock falls below them. Balances are live per unit and update the moment goods are accepted at the door, so the number the chef sees reflects what actually came in.

A small café and a busy hotel kitchen can carry the same item at very different levels. Setting par by unit stops the larger kitchen running short while the smaller one throws stock away.

The central commissary acts as the group's central store. It buys in bulk from suppliers and sends prepared or bulk goods out to units as transfers. Each transfer is dispatched at the commissary and confirmed when the unit receives it, so both ends agree on what moved.

Head office and finance see stock and spend across the network. Each unit sees only its own records, enforced with row-level security in the database.

Bollard covers buying and stock: kitchen orders, approvals, purchase orders, receiving, invoice matching and transfers between the commissary and units. Taking orders at the till and costing recipes stay in the tools you already use for them.

What connects to those systems is scoped on the discovery call, and Safock sets out what works out of the box and what would need to be built.