PO pre-flight — incomplete or inconsistent quote and PO details

This Watch reads a request, a quote, a proof request or a purchase order and lists everything the next step is going to need and does not have — all of it in one point, so one email asks for all of it. In Settings → Workspace → Watches it sits under Follow-ups as FO-3.

What it watches for

• A document missing something the next step needs: artwork, a ship-to address, an in-hands date, a quantity, or a decoration specification.
• Details that disagree across documents — the request says 500, the quote says 480, the purchase order says 600.
• A part number, decoration location, color or quantity that the supplier's own product data does not actually offer.
• An imprint specification that does not exist anywhere in the paperwork.

Why it matters

Incomplete paperwork does not stop work; it delays it by a day at a time, one question at a time. The customer gets emailed on Monday for artwork, on Tuesday for the ship-to, on Thursday for the size breakdown — and each round trip costs a day against the in-hands date and a little of the customer's patience. The point of a pre-flight is to ask once. It is also where the expensive mistakes live: a part number the supplier does not carry in that color becomes an order that gets rejected, three days after you thought it was placed.

This Watch books as Avoided on the Found ledger.

What it needs connected

• Required: a mailbox — the requests, quotes and purchase orders Scout reads are the documents that passed through your mail.
• Helpful: a supplier feed, a CRM. The supplier feed is what lets Scout check a part, a color or a decoration location against what the supplier actually publishes.

What the point looks like

A point is one item Scout raises with the proof behind it. This one arrives in the Inbox as a recommendation:

The Happy Hound Hotel request is missing three things — Happy Hound Hotel · first request, today

Ray Delgado's request has no artwork attached, no ship-to address, and no in-hands date. The quantity is given as "about 250", and the supplier's minimum on the requested item is 288 — so the quantity needs settling before this can be quoted.

Evidence: the request email in Gmail · the supplier's product data for the requested part, with its minimum · the list of gaps, each tied to the document it is missing from.

Prepared by Scout: one email asking Ray for all four items together.

The settings that tune it

None. Its settings block reads No adjustable thresholds — a missing ship-to is missing regardless of how patient you would like to be about it.

When it arrives

This is a second-wave Watch. It is not raising points today — its row in Settings reads Coming soon. You can turn it on now; there is nothing else to configure. We do not publish a date for it.

Good to know

• One point lists every gap. Scout deliberately does not raise a separate item per missing field.
• Scout never sends the email and never places the purchase order. Purchase orders remain read-only in Scout — it reads them, and that is all.
• Cross-document disagreement is often the more valuable half of this Watch. Two numbers that do not match are easy to miss and expensive to discover at the factory.
• A purchase order that went out complete and came back changed is SI-1.
• A quote missing a charge rather than a detail is FI-3, the quote margin guard.