How To Order Lab Supplies: Without Spreadsheets And Emails

Is your team still using Spreadsheets for creating and tracking purchasing orders?

Most Biotech or Pharma companies start their purchasing process with emails and spreadsheets.

In the beginning, there are only a few scientists, and then the lab grows, and you need to purchase more lab supplies and capital equipment to run the experiments.

At some point, the email-based approvals for purchases become unsustainable.

Moreover, investors require better cost controls and visibility for compliance purposes.

If you are a CFO/controller of the company, you probably have the following questions and concerns:

1. Do I have enough cash to cover the expenses till the next raise? You don’t want to run out of money.
2. Get a better handle on the burn rate to calculate the cash flow needed to sustain the research.
3. Concerned about the efficient use of your resources, i.e., time spent by scientists in value-adding activities like doing experiments vs. managing spreadsheets for order tracking and chasing emails for approvals.
4. You are concerned about effective inventory utilization. You are worried about purchasing too much or too little inventory.

If you are thinking about these questions, you are not alone.

We have helped many Biotech companies’ finance teams answer these questions and gain better cash flow visibility.

In this article, you will learn:

1. How to improve lab productivity by automating the purchasing process. We will show you a step-by-step process to improve your team’s productivity by at least 40%.
2. How to automate the purchase approval flow for better cash flow visibility.
3. Track lab supplies at a central place to track usage and speed up the research process.

Are you struggling to track the purchase orders of your company? If so, we highly encourage you to download our free purchase order tracker template to help you centralize your order tracking in a single place! 

Let’s get started.

Lab Supplies Request Process And Efficiency Loss

The main issue with the manual spreadsheet process is the loss of efficiency and your inability to track expenses unless the books are closed at the month-end.

Let’s first look at a typical process, where the choke points for efficiency are, and what we can do to unplug those efficiency blocks.

We assume lab technicians are requesting a purchase that lab managers and finance approved.

The current process looks like this:

Step 1: Request lab supplies

If you have an approval process for purchasing lab supplies, the first step is for the lab technician to request the purchase.

Spreadsheets could do this, or you probably have a requisition form that needs to be attached to the request for purchase.

Most companies resort to just sending purchase requests via email.

You must first visit different vendor websites, find what you are looking for, enter that information in a requisition form, and then request approval.

The challenge here is not that the request process is manual. It also takes more time to have the purchase request approved because the lab manager might not have enough information to approve the request.

Step 2: Approve the request for lab supplies

Once the request is ready for approval, the request is sent for approval before the lab technician can place the order for lab supplies.

There are a couple of challenges with this manual approach:

1. The first issue with manual approvals is that it takes time. The lab manager might forget to approve it on time and need multiple reminders. Not all lab managers are like that!
2. The other issue is the approval matrix. How do you know who needs to approve the purchase requisition?
3. If you have a multi-level approval process, the lab technician must remember everyone who needs approval.
4. The lab manager might want to know if we already have items in inventory, and that takes time to find out.
5. Or different approvers might want to know if a budget is available for purchase.

Due to these reasons, email-based approvals are not effective

Step 3: Order lab supplies

Once all the approvals are in place, the lab technician must place the order with the vendor.

There is a duplicate effort here:

First, the lab technician has to go to a vendor’s website, find what they want to purchase, get the total cost, and send it for approval.

And once it is approved, the same effort must be duplicated on the vendor’s website to place the order.

Some vendors don’t have online ordering and request a purchase order.

That is another additional step; you must create a purchase order on a spreadsheet if you don’t have a purchasing system.

Step 4: Tracking purchase orders

Once you have placed the purchase order, you need to track the purchase order, and that becomes another spreadsheet!

Here are the things that need to be tracked:

1. Has the vendor accepted the purchase order?
2. Are any items in the backorder?
3. What is the expected ship date, and do you need to expedite the shipping?
4. Once you have the tracking information, you want to track the delivery, etc.

After receiving the purchase order, the next step is to let the AP team know you have received it so they can pay the vendor on time.

Step 5: Managing Lab supply inventory

You got the product; now you need to track what has been consumed and what is being used by whom.

Theft is not an issue for many companies, but if you are not keeping track of what is being used and by whom, there is a potential for theft.

If you don’t have an inventory system, you probably have another spreadsheet for tracking the lab inventory.

You, of course, need to track who is using what inventory, but you also want to track the date of expiry and lot numbers to trace back the usage to the lot number easily.

Tracking inventory also allows you to book costs for different experiments.

So if your finance team wants granular spend visibility, they probably want to track expenses at different projects/experiments.

Looking for a better way to automate the purchasing process for your lab supplies? Click here to see ProcureDesk in action.

Steps To Automate Your Lab Supplies Purchasing Process

So how do you go about simplifying the lab supplier’s purchasing process?

The sections below will cover a step-by-step process and show how to improve the lab’s productivity. Specifically how a purchasing system can help simplify the process for lab purchases and order tracking

Step 1: Automate the requisition process

The first is automating the purchase requisition process so that you do not spend endless hours chasing the managers for approval.

Here are the key ingredients of a purchase requisition process.

1. Get rid of manual purchase requisition forms and implement an electronic purchase requisition process.
2. Reduce the time spent creating purchase requisitions by leveraging the data defaults wherever possible.
3. Use smart rules to set up cost accounting defaults so that the lab technicians don’t have to worry about choosing the right chart of accounts.
4. Use catalogs wherever possible; more on this in the catalog section.

The following screenshot shows how a requisition would look like in a purchase requisition process:

Step 2: Reduce time spent on approvals

On average, companies can have up to 12 -24 hours long purchase order approval cycles. The longer the approval process, the more time it takes to place the purchase order and receive the products.

Here are some ideas on how to reduce the purchase approval cycle time:

1. Set up automated rules for approval so the system can determine where the request must be routed for approval. That way, Lab technicians don’t have to determine who needs to approve a purchase.
2. Use the 80/20 rule for purchase approval. 80% of the purchases contribute to 20% of the Spend. So instead of focusing on approving every purchase, only approve the 20% of spend that contributes to 80% of the spend.
3. Have a flexible process so lab managers can approve the requisitions faster. For example: Allow email approvals so the purchase request can be approved via email. Alternatively, you can use a mobile app to approve the requisition from your mobile device.

Here is an example of an effective workflow:

Step 3: Keep finance in the loop

CFOs care about cost control, and so should you 🙂

The finance team monitors the cash flow so you don’t run out of money. The finance team must review large purchases in advance to control the purchase order timing based on the projected cash flow.

So how do you involve finance in the approval process?

1. You can set up the workflow so that Finance approves all large purchases. This can be set up with conditional rules in the workflow.
2. Provide detailed purchase order reporting to the finance team so they know what is committed.

Here is how to include finance in the approval process:

The other benefit of involving finance in the approval process is that they can validate the chart of accounts assigned to the purchase.

This allows for the cost and accurate financial accounting to be booked to the right account.

Step 4: Use catalogs for simple purchasing

Why spend time entering purchase requisition data when you can choose what you want to purchase?

If it is no different from the online shopping experience that you use for personal purchases.

There are primarily two types of catalogs that you can leverage

External catalogs:

With external catalogs, you can browse the vendor’s catalog and pick what you want to purchase. This is called a punch-out catalog

Here is an example of a punchout catalog:

Once you have decided what to purchase, you can transfer the shopping cart to your purchasing system.

You can even automate the coding of the purchase requisitions so that the technicians don’t have to worry about entering the correct cost codes.

If you are concerned about limiting the purchase to selected items, a punchout can also handle that. You can ask the vendor to limit the number of items or the type of item that is available for purchase.

Internal catalogs:

Not all vendors can’t support a punchout catalog.

It could be that they don’t have the infrastructure to support it, and some vendors probably won’t issue you a punchout because your purchasing volume is low.

In that case, you can ask the vendor to provide you with commonly purchased products or services, and you can create your catalog.

Here is an example of an internal catalog:

Internal catalogs give you better cost control because you can limit what you show in the internal catalog and adjust pricing as needed.

Step 5: Automatically track vendor acknowledgments and shipments

Once you have placed the order with the vendor, you need to track the lifecycle of the purchase order.

Now it is more important than ever to track the purchase order because of the uncertainty in the supply chain.

With a purchasing system, you can centralize the order tracking once the order is placed.

Here are a couple of ways:

1. Have the vendors acknowledge the order so that you know whether the product is available or not. If the order is back-ordered, the vendor should be able to identify those items easily.
2. Allow vendors to provide tracking information so that you can track what products are on the way and what is delivered.
3. Allow end-users to confirm that the product has been delivered by creating a full or partial receipt.

Here is an example of how you can track purchase orders:

Step 6: Sync approvals and coding to QuickBooks (or your ERP)

The reason spreadsheets survive this long is simple: the tool people order from and the system finance closes the books in don’t talk to each other. That gap is where the re-keying, the coding errors, and the month-end reconciliation all come from.

A purchasing system built for finance closes that gap with bidirectional QuickBooks sync. GL codes, classes, projects, and vendors flow both ways, and an approved purchase order writes back to QuickBooks so the books reflect committed spend in real time — not three weeks later at close. ProcureDesk syncs natively with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, and QuickBooks Enterprise — not just QuickBooks Online, which is where most tools stop — plus Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Microsoft Business Central, and Xero. For labs, that also means AP automation for QuickBooks runs off the same data, so nothing gets entered twice.

Step 7: Match the invoice automatically with 3-way matching

Remember the receipt step from earlier? This is where it pays off. 3-way matching compares three documents before a single dollar goes out: the purchase order, the goods receipt, and the vendor invoice. When all three agree, the invoice is cleared for payment automatically. When they don’t — a short shipment, a price that crept up since the quote, a duplicate invoice — the system flags it instead of paying it.

For a lab buying reagents and consumables from dozens of vendors, this is the difference between an AP person keying invoices for two days at month-end and a close that mostly runs itself. It is also the control that stops overbilling and duplicate payments before they happen. Teams that automate their invoice approval workflow this way typically see 90% fewer invoices arriving without a matching PO, an 80% cut in invoice-processing time, and a month-end close that drops from around 10 days to 4.

Lab Supplies Inventory Tracking

So far, we have covered the process for ordering the lab supplies.

But how do you keep track of that?

How do you know what you have in Inventory at any time? What lots have expired and can’t be used?

You need to know all this important information to manage the inventory effectively.

Here is what we recommend for tracking the inventory of lab supplies.

Organize Your Inventory by Locations/Bins

You can maintain different locations in an inventory system if you have multiple labs.

However, you might also want to arrange inventory by different bins/locations within the same lab.

By organizing the inventory in different locations, it is simple to track and report on inventory. For example:

This also allows you to easily transfer the inventory between different locations to make effective use of inventory.

Let’s say you have excess inventory at one location and a nearby location needs the same product; then, it is simple to transfer and keep track of the transfer.

Release Management To Track Usage

How do you track who is using what product in the lab?

That is where a release management process comes into the picture.

A release management process not only helps you track inventory that is being released for consumption but also allows you to track the following:

1. Who is requesting the inventory, and for what purpose?
2. If you want to track the inventory usage by project, you can attach the release document to a project.

You get accurate usage reports and cost allocation to different projects.

Inventory Reports For Inventory Valuation

Want to know how much inventory you have at hand and the total value of the inventory?

That is where inventory valuation comes into the picture.

With the built-in Inventory reports, you can easily track how much inventory you have and the total inventory cost.

For example, if you group up your inventory into different categories, for example, Chemicals, beakers, etc., then you also track the inventory value by these categories.

Here is a sample inventory valuation report:

Software vs. spreadsheets: what to actually use to order lab supplies

Once a lab decides to move off spreadsheets, the next question is which kind of tool to use — and the honest answer depends on the problem you are solving.

Lab-native inventory tools (Quartzy, Zageno, Benchling). These are good at catalog browsing and bench-level inventory — what is on the shelf, what is running low, what has expired. Where they stop is financial control: multi-level approvals, budget enforcement at the point of request, 3-way matching, and native write-back to QuickBooks or Sage Intacct. They are built for the scientist, not the Controller.

Corporate cards (Ramp, Brex). These control spend after the swipe. There is no punchout to Thermo Fisher or VWR, no goods receipt, and no 3-way match — fine for small tail-spend buys, not for PO-based lab purchasing where finance needs to approve before the commitment.

Enterprise suites (Coupa, SAP Ariba). Full source-to-pay, but scoped and priced for 1,000-plus-employee organizations, with implementations that run 6–12 months.

Mid-market procure-to-pay built for the Controller (ProcureDesk). Spend control before the invoice — approvals, budget enforcement, 3-way matching, and QuickBooks Desktop and Enterprise support (not just Online), with punchout to the vendors labs actually use and done-for-you setup in 2–4 weeks. If you want the full picture, our guide to purchasing software for biotech breaks this down by scenario.

The simplest way to choose: if you need to know what is on the shelf, a lab inventory tool is enough. If you need to control what gets ordered before the money moves — and have it reconcile itself in QuickBooks — that is an automated purchasing problem, not an inventory one.

Who this approach is for (and who it isn’t)

This process fits mid-market life-sciences and biotech finance teams — roughly 100 to 1,000 employees, $5M–$250M in revenue — running QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, or NetSuite, where a one-to-three-person finance team is absorbing lab purchasing and month-end is starting to stretch past five days. The usual triggers are invoices showing up without a PO, reagent spend running ahead of budget, approvals living in email and Slack, and headcount growth turning ordering into a daily scramble. Companies like Cerebral Therapeutics and Metabolon moved off spreadsheets at exactly this stage.

It is not the right fit for a ten-person lab that a shared spreadsheet still covers, or a 5,000-person enterprise already standardized on SAP or Coupa. This is for the company that has outgrown the inbox but does not want a 12-month enterprise rollout.

Email vs a lab tool vs a procurement system

Grant-funded labs should align approval tiers with their institution’s federal procurement standards (2 CFR 200). Weighing lab-native tools? See our Quartzy alternatives comparison.

Frequently asked questions

How do biotech labs order supplies without spreadsheets and email?

Route every purchase through one request-to-pay system: requesters order from punchout catalogs (Thermo Fisher, VWR, Amazon Business, Grainger), approvals route automatically by amount and budget, and the coding syncs to QuickBooks or Sage Intacct. That replaces the vendor-site-plus-inbox process and gives finance real-time visibility into committed spend.

What is the best way to set up an approval workflow for lab supply orders on QuickBooks?

Use conditional rules so low-dollar requests route automatically and larger purchases go to finance, then sync approved POs and GL coding back to QuickBooks Online, Desktop, or Enterprise. That keeps approvals out of email and writes committed spend to the books before the invoice arrives.

How does 3-way matching work for lab supply invoices?

The system matches the purchase order, the goods receipt, and the vendor invoice automatically before payment. Mismatches — wrong quantity, price creep, duplicate invoices — get flagged instead of paid, which removes manual invoice reconciliation at month-end.

How is ProcureDesk different from lab inventory tools like Quartzy?

Lab inventory tools manage catalogs and bench-level stock; ProcureDesk is procure-to-pay built for the Controller — multi-level approvals, budget enforcement at the point of request, 3-way matching, and native QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite sync. Many labs run an inventory tool at the bench and ProcureDesk for financial control.

How can finance track lab supply spend by project or grant?

Tag each purchase request to a project, experiment, or grant at the point of request, so spend is coded correctly before the order is placed. Finance can then report burn by program in real time instead of reconstructing it from receipts at close.

Now Your Turn!

In this article, we have covered an end-to-end process to help you reduce the time spent purchasing and tracking inventory.

By leveraging this process, most of our clients have seen results like this:

1. Around 30% faster AP and invoice processing. Approvals move from days to hours, and a lab that once took 7 to 8 days to close the books can get that down to about 3.
2. 7 to 10 hours a week returned to the finance team, with far less time creating and tracking purchase orders. Purchase orders are easily created from catalogs, and with central order tracking, you can track when the product is shipped.
3. The same team handles 10 to 20% more purchasing volume without adding headcount, helped by better inventory management.

Curious to see how ProcureDesk can help you achieve these results?

About the author

Sachin Sharma

Sachin Sharma is the CEO of ProcureDesk and has spent over 23 years in procurement and supply chain technology. He previously led procurement operations at a Fortune 500 company before founding ProcureDesk. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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