He doesn’t live in a garbage can on Sesame Street, he lives in our accounts receivable and accounts payable office.

Let’s set the stage.

Cookies have been selling like MAD.

We are buying more from our suppliers than ever before.

And since we’ve worked with a few of them for a while we don’t start with asking for a quote but rather send them a purchase order (PO) for the flour, sugar, and eggs we need at the price we bought it at last time.

The only problem is we keep running out of eggs with this dang chicken virus!!

AND as fast as I’m cutting POs I’m still having days where we have to stop production because we’re missing ingredients.

How does this relate back to the monster in accounts receivable and accounts payable?

The orders I send to our suppliers aren’t getting fulfilled because they aren’t sending the goods as soon as I need them.

There are wayyy too many orders for me to follow up with each one.

Especially when you combine that with the fact that once something does arrive I have to track down the PO, visually scan the total amount and individual amount for each item and confirm it matches the invoice and what was marked as received in our factory and on top of that I’m trying to forecast sales for the next quarter and plan accordingly with inventory levels as we plan to work with a distributor!