i-Clarity Purchase Order Processing consists of 5 stages:

1. Creating an initial purchase order
2. Sending it to the supplier
3. Recording the goods and services that have been received
4. Reconciling the goods received with the supplier invoice
5. Exporting the confirmed invoice to an accounts package, e.g. Xero, for analysis and payment.

This article looks at section 3, recording the goods and services that have been received

When you receive stock, you should always record the fact that it has been received against the relevant purchase order. This will achieve several objectives depending on the type of order that you are dealing with. In all cases, recording the fact that a purchase order has been received will make it possible to reconcile those purchase orders with the relevant invoices – see the section on Invoicing for further details about this.

Spectacle orders

These are marked as being received by clicking the Received and Checked Date flag on the Spectacle Order form. This will update any linked frame or lens orders as having been received and move the relevant spectacle order from the list of Outstanding Orders to the list of Uncollected Orders.

Note that if you later find that the order has not been made correctly, then you can untick the box. This will mean that the order is once again an outstanding one; it will also put a note in the ‘Progress and Collection Notes’ form.

Contact Lenses

When you receive a batch of contact lenses, they should be accompanied by a delivery note which will have your order reference on it, e.g. ‘RE/C675’.

From the CL Management form, (it does not matter which patient record is on display on the Main form), click the Receive Goods button.

In the top left-hand corner, there is a dropdown which displays the list of current CL purchase orders that have not yet been received. Select the PO for the goods that have arrived and click the ‘Retrieve Goods’ button:

You can now check that the despatch contains all the items that were ordered, and the correct powers have been supplied.

If certain lenses are missing, then you should amend the quantity to reflect the quantity actually received. The system will then ask display the following dialog:

The answer to this will usually be Yes, as contact lens shortages are usually resolved quite quickly. Answering yes will mean that this PO will not be flagged as having been delivered, and it will still appear on the list of CL POs waiting to be delivered. You will then be able to record the delivery of the missing lenses, when they finally arrive, against the original purchase order.

If, on the other hand, you answer No, then this PO will be flagged as complete. Typically, you would then need to raise another PO for the missing lenses.

If you are using Purchase Invoice Processing then you can enter the despatch note reference that accompanied the lenses, by entering the reference in the Despatch Note Ref box and pressing the Set button:

This will enable you to reconcile the goods that have been delivered against the relevant purchase invoice.

When lenses have been received you normally need to contact the patients to let them know their contact lenses have arrived. I-Clarity has 2 ways of achieving this:

• You can create a recall scheme of the type ‘CLs Rec[eived]’ in Maintenance then, when CLs are received, apply the scheme using the ‘CLs Received Scheme’ dropdown on the Receive Goods form, (highlighted in red in the picture above). This will send a communication to each patient of the type specified by the recall scheme, and this can be set up so that the patient will receive further communications until they collect their lenses. (Note: if you have a recall scheme with multiple stages, you must remember to cancel the reminders manually when a patient collects their lenses). This is the recommended approach if you have large numbers of patients regularly receiving contact lenses, where manually contacting each patient would otherwise be very time consuming.
• Alternatively, if you don’t assign a recall scheme to the recipients of the selected purchase order, then the patients will automatically be put in the action list for a member of staff to work through and contact each patient manually.

Other Stock (Frames etc)

All other purchase orders are processed from the Stock form. If you click the Receive Goods button you are then presented with the same Receive Goods form as the previous section, but the dropdown allowing you to select the purchase order only displays stock purchase orders, i.e. it excludes spectacle and CL POs.

From this form you can perform the following tasks:

• Record that the goods have been received. (Note that you can also print barcode labels for the selected goods at this stage).
• Record that some products have NOT been received, and either put them on backorder or not.
• Add additional products to the purchase order (this may be particularly useful if a supplier has substituted one product for another as this will allow you to make sure that your stock levels are updated correctly).
• Assign a despatch note reference to each of the product lines that have been received.