The purchase order includes terms that differ from your quote

Two documents can disagree while both are accurate copies

A purchase order that restates your quote with changes — a different payment term, a new delivery condition, standard wording that contradicts your stated terms — is not automatically wrong, and neither is your quote. Each document accurately records what its issuer proposed. The error would be pretending they agree. Microsoft's Dynamics 365 sales data model describes quotes as carrying products, prices, payment terms, effective dates, and requested delivery dates, and distinguishes the quote, the accepted order, and the invoice — a useful checklist of exactly the fields where a buyer's PO can quietly rewrite your offer.

The task is not to decide which document wins. It is to make the disagreement enumerable, so that someone with authority can decide what your business will accept, and so the invoice that eventually goes out matches a decision rather than an accident.

List each conflict against both versions

Fix the versions first: the exact quote and revision, and the exact PO with its date and reference. Then walk the commercial fields one at a time — price, quantity and unit, payment terms, delivery terms, freight or shipping responsibility, and any stated conditions — and write down every difference, quoting both sides. A difference you cannot point to in the text is a feeling, not a conflict; a conflict you find but do not write down will be rediscovered by the buyer's accounts team at invoice time.

Include the terms the PO adds that your quote never addressed. An absent topic in your quote does not make the buyer's added term agreed, any more than it makes it rejected. Mark those as new terms requiring a decision, separate from true contradictions.

Ask the buyer to confirm the operative term

One available resolution route is the buyer's own written confirmation. Where the buyer works through a managed procurement portal, the channel may be formal: Coupa's supplier guidance — specific to that platform — states that the buyer manages supplier setup, purchase-order changes, invoice approval, and payment, and directs suppliers facing an invoice-to-PO amount mismatch to request a buyer change order rather than invoice around the discrepancy. The same guidance notes that invoice comments and history can explain a disputed status, and that an approval and a payment instruction date are not confirmation that funds reached the supplier's account.

Whatever the channel, record the question you sent, the answer received, and which document version the answer attaches to. A verbal assurance that never reaches a dated record cannot align an invoice later, and a portal status is a workflow state, not money.

What records cannot settle goes to its owner

Some items on the conflict list will be commercial: your business can simply decide whether to accept the buyer's stated term. Those go to the person authorized to accept terms, with both texts in front of them. Others — which document's terms legally govern, whether a contract formed, what remedies exist — are legal questions. This worksheet deliberately does not answer them; they go to qualified counsel with the complete conflict list and both document versions.

Once each item has an answer, align the order and the invoice to the confirmed version only, and keep the conflict register with the file so the next reviewer can see why the documents were written the way they were. If the root cause is that your storefront checkout displays terms the negotiated documents then contradict, that website concern can be raised in a Prism consultation; scope, responsibilities, fees and terms are confirmed before any work.

Term-conflict register

Complete one register per quote-and-PO pair from the actual documents. Quote both sides of every conflict. An item without an owner and an answer stays open, and the order and invoice are not aligned until each open item is resolved.

Worksheet entries are not submitted by Prism’s worksheet and are not saved by the site. Use record types, availability, anonymized observations, or match/mismatch results. Do not enter government identifiers, customer names or addresses, customer messages, receipt-access links, card or bank details, passwords, or keys. Send sensitive documents only through the provider’s verified secure channel.

These are temporary notes. Leaving or reloading this page may clear them. Worksheet entries are not sent automatically. If you copy notes into the consultation message and submit the form, Prism receives them as part of your request.