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The buy got approved on a Thursday.
Thirty thousand units, nineteen dollars landed, five hundred seventy thousand dollars. Everyone agreed it was the right size.
The money left on a Tuesday about three weeks later.
It was a different number, and nobody has put the two side by side.
The approval and the commitment are separate events
The meeting produces a decision. The wire produces an obligation.
Between them sit three weeks of ordinary work: final quantities against vendor minimums, a freight quote that has to be re-pulled because the first one expired, a confirmation that comes back slightly different from what was quoted.
None of that is misconduct. It's just what happens between agreeing to something and doing it.
The problem is that your governance sits on the first event and your cash sits on the second.
Every increment had an approver. The total didn't.
Walk the three weeks.
Minimum order quantity. You planned 30,000 across six colorways, five thousand each. The factory's real minimum is 5,400 a colorway. Six times 5,400 is 32,400. Ops approved it, correctly, because ops owns the vendor relationship and that is the actual minimum. Cost of the rounding at the approved landed rate: $45,600.
Freight. The quote behind the $19.00 expired. The new one lands the unit at $20.10. Logistics accepted it, correctly, because that's the market. Cost across 32,400 units: $35,640.
Now the total. 32,400 units at $20.10 is $651,240.
The room approved $570,000.
The difference is $81,240, and it is 14.3% above the number anyone actually voted on.
Every piece of that was approved by somebody with real authority over that specific decision. The sum was approved by nobody, because the sum never went back to the room.
The deposit is the real approval and it has no approver
At 30% down, the meeting's number implies a deposit of $171,000. The actual wire is $195,372.
Someone in accounting released that payment against a vendor invoice. It matched the invoice. It reconciled cleanly. Nothing looked wrong, because from where they sat nothing was wrong.
Do this on four buys a year and you have committed roughly $325,000 of capital that never passed through the approval you built to control exactly this.
One line before every wire
Before any deposit goes out, put the approved number and the placed number next to each other, name each increment, and have whoever approved the original sign the delta or send it back.
It takes a minute. It is the only moment in the process where the total is visible to the person who owns it.
And it changes vendor behavior faster than anything else you can do, because the increments stop being free.
Your approval process governs a conversation.
Your money leaves three weeks later, unattended, for a number nobody in that conversation ever saw.
CALL TO ACTION
Pull last quarter's approved buys against last quarter's wires. If the two columns don't match and nobody can explain the gap line by line, that's the twenty minutes.
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