Free guide
How to follow up with suppliers without losing track
A simple system for staying on top of open purchase orders, plus three email templates you can copy right now. Works with a plain spreadsheet — you don't need any software to use this.
Most purchasing teams don't lose track of orders because they're disorganized. They lose track because the follow-up step has no natural trigger. An order gets placed, it goes into a spreadsheet or your ERP, and then nothing prompts you to check on it again until it's already late — usually when someone downstream asks where it is.
The fix isn't a better memory. It's a weekly routine with a fixed order of operations.
The 10-minute weekly routine
- 1. Sort every open order by promised delivery date, oldest first. Not by supplier, not by order value — by date. The order at the top of the list is the one costing you the most if it slips further.
- 2. Split into three buckets. Past due, due in the next 7 days, and no confirmed date at all. An order with no confirmed date is arguably the most urgent — you don't even know if it's on schedule.
- 3. Work top to bottom, oldest first. Don't cherry-pick the easy ones. The point of sorting is that you stop deciding what to chase and just work the list.
- 4. Log the outcome immediately, not at the end of the day. "No reply," "confirmed for the 14th," "delayed, new date TBC" — one line, right after you send or hear back. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the reason the same order gets forgotten twice.
Three follow-up email templates
Copy, paste, fill in the brackets. Keep it short — a long email gives a busy supplier more reasons to put off replying.
First follow-up — order is due soon
Subject: Following up on [PO number] — due [date] Hi [name], Checking in on [PO number] for [item], due [date]. Could you confirm this is still on track? If anything's changed, just let me know the new expected date. Thanks, [your name]
Order is now overdue
Subject: [PO number] is now [X] days past the promised date Hi [name], [PO number] was promised for [date], which has now passed. Could you confirm the current status and a realistic new delivery date? If something on your end is holding this up, I'd rather know now than find out later — happy to work with a revised timeline. Thanks, [your name]
No response after a first follow-up
Subject: Re: [PO number] — need a status update this week Hi [name], I haven't heard back on [PO number], now [X] days overdue. I need a firm update by [specific day] — either a confirmed ship date or a note that this won't be fulfilled, so I can plan around it either way. Thanks, [your name]
When this stops being enough
This routine works fine at a handful of open orders. It breaks down for the same reason most manual systems do: it depends on you remembering to sit down and do it, every single week, and on the log actually staying accurate as things change. Past roughly 20–30 open orders, most people find the weekly sort itself starts eating a real chunk of a morning.
That's the exact routine SupplierPing automates: it sorts your open orders into the same overdue / due-soon / unconfirmed buckets, drafts the follow-up email for you (you still approve every send), and reads the supplier's reply back into the order so the log updates itself. If you're doing this by hand and it's working, keep doing it — if it's starting to slip, there's a 14-day free trial, no card required.