Why Work Done Without a Purchase Order Often Goes Unpaid
Why this matters
Every shop that works for institutions eventually performs a job on a verbal go-ahead from someone who clearly had the authority to give it, and then spends months discovering they did not. The instinct at that point is to escalate: call the director, call their boss, point out that the work was necessary and good. That instinct fails, and it fails for a reason worth understanding, because nobody in the chain is refusing to pay you. The invoice is stuck at a control that has no discretion to release it, and the fix is a specific administrative act with a name, not persuasion.
The control that stops the invoice
Accounts payable in an institution runs a three-way match. Three documents have to agree before payment is released:
- The purchase order, which proves someone with delegated authority obligated the funds.
- A receiving or acceptance record, which proves the goods or work were actually delivered.
- Your invoice, which has to match both.
Missing any one of the three and the payment does not process. Not "gets delayed." Does not process. The clerk looking at your invoice cannot approve it on the strength of the story, and would be committing the exact violation the control exists to prevent if they did. Separation of duties, which is the principle that the person who authorizes an expenditure is never the person who pays it, is a foundational internal control in public and nonprofit accounting, and it is what the GAO's Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government, commonly called the Green Book, describes as the basis for control activities in this area.
That is why escalation does not work. The facilities director cannot make accounts payable pay an unmatched invoice, because the whole design of the system is that they cannot. What they can do is start a different process, and that is what you should be asking for.
The three real remedies, in the order you should try them
A confirming purchase order. Also called an after-the-fact or ratifying purchase order. This is a purchase order issued after the work, backed by a written justification explaining why normal procurement could not be followed. Most institutions have this mechanism, most buyers dislike using it because it generates a record, and it is nonetheless the normal path.
Release against an existing agreement. If you hold a standing order, a term contract or a cooperative contract that already covers the category of work, the work may be attachable to it retroactively, which sidesteps the whole problem. This is the strongest argument for having such an agreement even at a customer whose volume seems not to justify one.
Governing body ratification. In a public body, if the amount crosses a threshold or the circumstances are irregular enough, the board or council must ratify the expenditure at a public meeting. This works. It is slow, it is on a monthly calendar, and the item appears with your company name on a public agenda under a heading nobody enjoys.
What is not on the list is a legal claim that they benefited so they must pay. Against a private company an unjust enrichment or quantum meruit theory sometimes has legs. Against a public body it frequently does not, because many jurisdictions hold that a contract formed outside the entity's statutory procurement procedures is unenforceable and that equitable recovery is unavailable, specifically to remove any incentive to perform first and paper it later. Assume the door is closed and act accordingly rather than counting on it.
A weekend at a municipal wastewater plant
A Saturday call at 06:40. A duty operator at a municipal treatment plant reports a failed pump on a wet well with the level rising. Overflow would put untreated water where it must not go, and the operator says exactly what an operator says: do whatever you have to, we cannot lose the plant.
On arrival at 07:30, the first decision was the safety boundary, and it turned out to be the commercial boundary too.
The wet well is a permit-required confined space. Hydrogen sulfide accumulates in exactly that geometry, it deadens the sense of smell at concentrations well below what harms you so smell is not a warning, and it is immediately dangerous at concentrations that a level change can release in seconds. Nobody enters. Entry requires the site's own permit under 29 CFR 1910.146, with continuous atmospheric monitoring, an attendant outside, a retrieval system, and for an atmosphere that can go immediately dangerous, supplied air or a self-contained breathing apparatus under a respiratory protection program per 29 CFR 1910.134. A cartridge respirator is not a control for that exposure. And under 29 CFR 1910.146 at paragraphs (c)(8) and (c)(9), the host has a duty to tell you which spaces are permit spaces and what is in them, and both parties coordinate the entry. If someone does go down and collapses, nobody follows them in; retrieval is non-entry, from outside, which is the single instruction that separates one casualty from two.
So the work performed that morning was all from outside the space: a bypass pump set on the surface, suction dropped in, discharge routed, and the failed pump's circuit isolated at the panel, locked and tagged, with the conductors proved dead using an instrument checked on a known live source before and after, under 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2) and NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5. Bypass pumping was established by 09:15, one hour and forty-five minutes after arrival, and the level began to fall.
That was the emergency. Everything after it was not.
Total time on the stabilization scope, including monitoring the bypass and isolating the failed pump: 6 hours, ending Saturday afternoon. The restoration scope, pulling the failed pump, rebuilding it, reinstalling and re-commissioning the controls, ran Sunday and Monday and took 20 hours. Twenty-six hours in total.
What happened to the invoice. Submitted on day 4. Rejected by accounts payable on day 18 with a note reading, in full, that no purchase order was referenced. Calls to the plant supervisor confirmed he had authorized it and had no ability to fix it. Calls to purchasing established that the amount crossed the threshold requiring council ratification. The item reached an agenda on day 154, was ratified, a confirming purchase order issued on day 159, and payment landed on day 168.
That customer's normal cycle is 45 days from invoice to payment. This was 168, which is roughly 3.7 times normal. Office time spent chasing it: about 9 hours, against 26 billed field hours, so administration consumed the equivalent of about 35 percent of the field hours on the job, none of it billable.
The number that matters most. Of the 26 hours, only the first 6 had any defensible emergency justification, which is about 23 percent. The other 20 hours were performed on a Sunday to be helpful, on a system that was stable, in a window when a buyer could have been reached on Monday morning. Had the shop stopped at stabilization Saturday afternoon and asked for a purchase order Monday, the emergency justification for 6 hours would have been straightforward, and the remaining 20 hours would have been a routine order.
The failure was not doing unauthorized work in an emergency. It was continuing to do unauthorized work after the emergency ended.
The boundary, stated so a technician can apply it at two in the morning
Emergency scope is whatever stops the harm. Stop the flooding, stop the discharge, isolate the fuel, restore heat to a single occupied zone, get the bypass running. This is defensible, it is what the institution's own emergency procurement provision exists for, and no shop should hesitate.
Restoration scope is everything after the harm has stopped. Rebuilding, replacing, re-commissioning, cleaning up, making it right. This is normal work with a normal procurement path, and it should wait for authorization even when you are already on site with the tools out and it feels absurd to leave.
The hand-off between the two is a phone call and a written note, made at the moment the situation stabilizes, not the next morning. Send a message that says what was found, what was done to stop the harm, how many hours that took, that the situation is now stable, and that the restoration scope needs authorization before it starts. That message is the document that makes a confirming purchase order easy to justify later, because it shows a vendor who stopped at the boundary rather than one who used an emergency as an opening.
What to set up in advance, before the next Saturday
Ask for the emergency procurement provision by name. Every institution has one. Ask what it allows, what threshold it covers, who invokes it, and what written record it needs. Ask during a calm week.
Get one named after-hours authorizer, with a backup. Not a role, a name and a number, and confirm annually because these people move.
Agree a written protocol in advance. Something like: your technician sends a written summary at the stabilization point, the authorizer replies in writing before restoration work begins, and a confirming purchase order follows within a stated number of business days. Put it in the standing agreement.
Get a standing order in place if the volume supports it at all. A standing order with even a modest cap converts most emergency calls from an authorization problem into a release, which is the single highest-value administrative thing you can do with an institutional customer. See related: What a Purchase Order Actually Obliges Both Sides To.
Write down who has said yes to you before, and what happened. A supervisor whose verbal authorization has been honored twice is not evidence he has authority. It is evidence that someone cleaned it up twice.
How to tell whether an invoice is stuck or refused
These look identical from your office and they need opposite responses.
Call the accounts payable contact, not your customer contact, and ask one question: "Is there a purchase order in your system for this, and if so what is the number?" The answer sorts it immediately.
No order exists. It is stuck at the match, nobody is refusing you, and the path is a confirming order. Ask the buyer, not the director, what their confirming order process requires and who signs the justification. Offer to write the factual portion yourself, because the buyer is writing it about a situation they were not present for.
An order exists but the invoice was rejected. Then it is a match failure on your side, and the cause is almost always in the line structure, the period of performance, the bill-to address, or a missing required attachment. That is a five-minute fix once you know which one.
An order exists and acceptance has not been recorded. Someone on their side has not closed the ticket or signed the receiving record. That is a call to your customer contact and it is the fastest of the three to clear.
Asking which of the three you are in, on day 20 rather than day 90, is what keeps a 168-day payment from happening twice.
References
- GAO, Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government (the Green Book), for separation of duties and control activities underlying the three-way match
- 29 CFR 1910.146, permit-required confined spaces, including host and contractor coordination duties at (c)(8) and (c)(9); 29 CFR 1910.134 for the respiratory protection program required in an atmosphere that can become immediately dangerous
- 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2), electrical safe work practices; NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5, verification of an electrically safe work condition
- See related: What a Purchase Order Actually Obliges Both Sides To; How an Institution Decides to Spend Money; Documenting Commercial Work to Survive a Payment Dispute