Full-service restaurant supplier month-end payment checklist - purchase orders, receiving records, and invoices matched three ways, returns deducted, every payment through nine gates before it leaves the account

You are a cash office coach for a full-service restaurant. Produce a Supplier Month-End Payment Checklist for the bookkeeper to run every payment day. Organize as "nine gates per supplier," each gate with three columns: check / pass standard / what to do when stuck. The list must work directly as the payment-day worksheet.

Scenario: a fixed monthly payment day, settling accounts with multiple monthly-billing suppliers - meat, produce, beverage, supplies.

Nine gates in fixed order:
1. Contract price check: statement unit prices against the contract or quote sheet, line by line. Pass: all match, or every difference carries a written price-change confirmation. Stuck: any price increase without written confirmation - hold that supplier this month until the confirmation exists
2. Three-way match: delivery slip, receiving record, and invoice agree on quantity and amount. Pass: all three present and consistent. Stuck: batches missing a receiving record are handled separately as a receiving problem, never merged into the payment
3. Quality deduction offset: rejections and accepted-with-deduction items recorded at receiving - are they deducted on the statement? Pass: every entry matches. Stuck: recorded deductions not offset - amend the statement before paying
4. Return offset: period returns (broken bottles, packaging back) deducted? Pass: return slips map one-to-one onto the statement
5. Price-change proration: for mid-month price changes, are batches before and after the change date priced in segments? Pass: correctly segmented. Stuck: a flat new/old price across the whole month - request a reissued statement
6. Invoice check: invoice amount equals this payment; invoices spanning months state their coverage period. Pass: amount and timing both agree. Stuck: mismatched amounts go to a pending-difference bucket - not paid first
7. Prepayment and deposit offsets: the house's prepayments and bottle deposits correctly applied in this settlement? Pass: both directions checked, nothing missed
8. Payee account check: the receiving account matches the account on file in the contract. Pass: account name and number identical. Stuck: any change request (a new account sent by chat, a verbal name change) requires a stamped, written change letter from the supplier - otherwise no payment. This is the single most common door payment fraud walks through
9. Approval chain: sign-offs per the house authority table complete. Pass: chain intact. Stuck: missing signatures get completed first - no pay-now-sign-later

Payment-day rules at the end of the checklist:
- Suppliers passing all nine gates pay normally
- Any supplier stuck at any gate gets pulled out individually, with the gate and the missing item written up and sent to purchasing and the GM the same day - the batch is never held, the exception is never dropped
- Unresolved stuck items enter a rolling "held payments" log and are cleared first on the next payment day

Constraints:
- This checklist does not re-adjudicate receiving quality - quality disputes resolve at the receiving step; here we only verify "a record exists and was offset"
- Tax treatment (invoice type, applicable rates) says "per house finance rules" - no specific tax positions are invented
- No recommendations to switch suppliers and no judgments of supplier quality - that belongs to purchasing

Why it is written this way

The biggest month-end risk is not arithmetic - it is "paying the supplier's number." The statement is their document, and an error in it (intentional or not) costs them nothing: a unit price nudged up half a unit, an un-returned credit, a mid-month price change applied flat across the month - each looks small and each times thirty days of volume is real money. Gates one through five all do one job: convert "the number they stated" into "a number both parties recognize" - using the contract, the receiving records, and the return slips the house holds in its own hands.

The three-way match sits second because it is the foundation: the delivery slip proves "they say it shipped," the receiving record proves "we confirmed it arrived," and the invoice proves "they billed it this way" - if the three disagree, every later gate runs on sand. Batches missing receiving records get separated rather than rejected outright because reality needs an escape valve: receiving slips do occasionally vanish, but once "pay without the slip" becomes tolerated, the match stops meaning anything - hence hold-and-reconstruct, never wave-through.

Gate eight carries the heaviest wording because it is the only check whose failure mode is "the money is simply gone." Suppliers impersonated with fresh account numbers, emails intercepted and payees swapped, a departed sales rep collecting on old relationships - these attacks time themselves to payment day, and recovery odds are near zero. The iron rule "stamped written change letter or no payment" costs a few days' delay and closes the entire category.

The payment-day rule "never hold the batch, never drop the exception" exists to defeat the most common failure of checklist tools: one or two stuck vendors lead the bookkeeper to sit on the whole batch, good suppliers drift toward cutting the house off, and the restaurant ends up begging. Pulling stuck items out, reporting them same-day, and rolling them forward keeps the process biting the specific problem instead of the whole payment day.

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