i-Clarity Purchase Order Processing consists of 5 stage:

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' box on the patient order or by selecting multiple spectacle orders in All Practice Orders and clicking 'Received Selected'. 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 - If you later find that the order has not been made correctly, then you can untick the 'Received and Checked Date' box. This will mean that the order is once again and Outstanding order. 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. URM/C1583.

Navigate to Purchase Orders for the Menu dropdown on the Main Patient Screen. Change the Order Type to CLS using the dropdown box. You can then either type in the Order Reference or scroll through the list to find the correct Purchase Order. When you have found the correct Purchase order, click to highlight it and then click 'Receive Goods'.

This will load the following screen.

You can now check that the despatch contains all the items that were ordered and that 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 display the following dialog box:

The answer to this will usually be 'Yes', as contact lens shortages are usually resolved quite quickly. Answering 'Yes' will mean that this Purchase Order will not be flagged as having been delivered and it will still appear in the list of CL Purchase Orders 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 Purchase Order will be flagged as complete. Typically, you would then need to raise another Purchase Order for the missing lens.

If you are using Purchase Invoice Processing then you can enter the dispatch note reference that accompanied the lenses by entering the reference in the Dispatch Note Ref box and clicking 'Set Dispatch Note Ref'.

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 contact lenses are received, apply the scheme using the 'CLs Received' scheme dropdown on the Receive Goods form. 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 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 want to assign a Recall Scheme to the recipients of the selected Purchase Order, then the patients will automatically be put in an 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 module. If you click the 'Receive Good' 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 Purchase Orders.

From this form you can perform the following tasks - 

• Record that the goods have been received. (Note - 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 Dispatch Note Reference to each of the product lines that have been received.