A purchasing process should survive a handoff
An owner should be able to leave for the afternoon without taking the purchasing process with them. The next person should know what was ordered, what the supplier accepted, what is late and what still needs a decision.
That is the ambition behind LineNow. The measure is ordinary work completed reliably, not the number of dashboards or AI features on a product page.
The problem we want to remove
Consider an illustrative café ordering week. The buyer builds a produce order in a spreadsheet, emails the supplier and then starts service. A reply changes two quantities and proposes a substitute. The receiver later checks the truck against the original order. The bookkeeper gets an invoice that reflects the supplier's version.
The problem is not that any of those people lacks discipline. Each is working from a different record. The same change has to be found, interpreted and entered several times.
A shared living purchase order can keep the original request, proposed change, buyer decision and actual receipt together. It does not remove the decision; it removes some of the effort of reconstructing it.
What we believe the software should do
Make the proposed quantity understandable. Show the demand, stock and supplier assumptions. Validate recipe quantities, unit conversions and opening counts. Give the operator a way to correct a recommendation before buying.
Carry the supplier's reply into the order. Capture the source, the relevant fields and unresolved ambiguity. Distinguish a proposed price or substitute from one the buyer accepted.
Demonstrate the actual route for email, messaging, EDI or portal orders. Explain what is sent directly and what requires forwarding or manual completion.