3-Way Match and Receiving

A three-way match is the control that stops you paying for things that never arrived. The purchase order says what you agreed to buy, the goods receipt says what turned up, the invoice says what you are being asked to pay, and all three have to agree before the payment goes out.

In most small organizations it is done by a person with a printout and a good memory, and it is done inconsistently. Amazon Business will do it, for the orders placed through it, if you turn on one setting.

Turning it on

Amazon publishes the configuration as four steps:

1. Go to Business Settings and select Receiving under Billing & shipping.
2. Choose the group or subgroup the setting should apply to.
3. Select Receiving Settings and enable track receiving.
4. Save the change to activate the feature.

Note the second step. Receiving is set per group or subgroup, not once for the whole organization. That is genuinely useful — a warehouse group can require receipt confirmation while a small marketing team does not — and it is also the reason a setting somebody switched on last year appears not to apply to the department asking about it now. Group structure is covered on multi-user accounts and approvals and shared payment methods and group payments.

Recording a receipt

Two routes, and the second one is the reason this sticks.

On the Receiving page

1. Select the relevant order on the Receiving page.
2. Enter the quantity received for each item, or select Mark everything received.
3. Save the details.

Per-item quantities are the point. Partial deliveries are where manual matching fails most often, and entering four of six received is what keeps the purchase order open until the remaining two arrive.

By barcode, on a phone

Amazon states you can scan the barcode of your package on arrival using the Amazon Business App and automatically complete a 3-Way Match. This is the difference between a control that works and one that gets retrospectively invented on the last day of the month, because it puts the confirmation at the loading bay rather than at a desk. See the Amazon Business mobile app.

What has to be in place first

A match needs something to match to. Two prerequisites are worth checking before you switch receiving on and wonder why nothing lines up:

• Order identification at checkout. PO numbers, cost centers or whatever your finance system keys on have to be captured when the order is placed — purchase orders and PO numbers covers the field limits and where they surface.
• Invoices in a matchable shape. Amazon's invoice templates decide whether you get one document per shipment or a consolidated monthly one, and that choice determines how much matching there is to do — invoices and receipts.

Amazon notes that invoice status is viewable in the context of a Business Credit Account. If you pay by card rather than by invoice, the next section is the piece that closes the loop instead.

Line Item Transaction Details, for card payers

The other half of reconciliation is what your card statement tells you. By default a commercial card sees one Amazon transaction and a total, which is useless for allocation. Amazon's Line Item Transaction Details pushes the detail into the card feed itself.

The fields Amazon lists are unusually complete: item description, item total, quantity, shipping amount, tax amount, tax rate, tax exempt status, unit cost, product code, invoice date, invoice ID, order ID, posting date, shipping address, source amount, supplier order number, currency, unit measure, carrier name, carrier tracking, GL code and cost center.

Eligibility is the constraint. Amazon names:

• Visa. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, PNC and JPMorgan Chase.
• Mastercard. Requires participation in Mastercard's Smart Data program.
• American Express. Corporate and purchasing cards, arranged through an account representative.

Amazon also names integrations on the same page — QuickBooks Online, Emburse, Zoho Expense and SAP Concur, alongside Ariba, Coupa and Jaggaer. For a small business the QuickBooks route is usually the relevant one and has its own page: QuickBooks and accounting integration.

Is it worth setting up?

A test that takes ten seconds. If your organization has ever paid an Amazon invoice without anyone independently confirming the goods arrived, yes — this is a control you are currently missing and it costs nothing to add. If one person orders, receives and reconciles everything themselves, the match adds process without adding assurance, and your effort is better spent on budgets and spending limits.

The organizations that get the most from it are the ones with a physical gap between the person who buys and the person who unpacks: manufacturing and industrial, contractors and jobsites and property management, where deliveries land somewhere nobody in finance can see.