Industry Trends

The Office Purchasing Checklist: 7 Steps Before You Order Print, Posters, or Break Room Gear

I'm the office administrator for a 60-person company. I manage all print and break room ordering—roughly $18,000 annually across about a dozen vendors. I report to both operations and finance, which means every purchase has to survive two sets of questions: "Do we need it?" and "Can we expense it?"

This is the checklist I run before any order over $200. It's seven steps, and it takes maybe 20 minutes if the specs are already on file. The steps are in the order I actually do them—not the order a procurement textbook would recommend.

The 7-Step Office Purchasing Checklist

Step 1 — Pull usage data before you hit reorder

The reorder button is a trap. It repeats last year's quantity, not this year's need.

When I took over purchasing in 2022, I reordered 5,000 business cards because that's what the previous admin had ordered. By the time they arrived, we had 3,100 old cards still in the closet—three people had left, two new hires had different titles, and the sales team had switched to a digital business card app for client-facing work. That order cost about $180—or rather, $186 with shipping—for cards that sat in a drawer until we recycled them in 2024.

Now I check badge records, email signatures, and the sales team's headcount before I open a quote. It takes ten minutes and has saved me from at least three unnecessary reorders.

Step 2 — Check promo codes before you compare prices

I do this before I look at unit price, because the code changes the total. For GotPrint orders—that's where we get flat print, including most of our business cards—I keep a folder of GotPrint codes bookmarked and check the coupon page the same day I'm ready to order. The GotPrint coupon code offers rotate, and the gap between a free-shipping code and no code on an $85 order is real money.

I'm not 100% sure the codes always stack, so I test one at a time in the cart before checkout. If a code doesn't apply, I don't force it—I just note the expiration date and move on.

The point isn't to chase the lowest unit price. It's to reduce total outlay without cutting specs. A 15% code on a job that needs a reprint because the paper was wrong isn't savings—it's a discount on a problem.

Step 3 — Write the spec sheet before you shop

Vague specs are how you end up with 500 business cards on 14 pt stock when you needed 16 pt with a matte finish. US standard business cards are 3.5 × 2 inches. Paper weight matters: 80 lb cover is roughly 216 gsm; 100 lb cover is around 270 gsm. If you're ordering GotPrint business cards, their template shows the options—but you need to know which one you want before you upload files.

We didn't have a formal spec sheet for the first two years. It cost us when a batch of envelopes came back with the window in the wrong position—we'd assumed the vendor kept our old specs on file. They hadn't. Now every print job gets a one-page spec sheet: size, stock, finish, quantity, and a note on which file version is approved.

If the job includes a brand color, ask how the vendor handles it. Pantone colors don't always have exact CMYK equivalents—Pantone 286 C, a common corporate blue, converts to approximately C:100 M:66 Y:0 K:2, but the printed result varies by press and paper. For brand-critical colors, Delta E under 2 is the usual tolerance. Worth asking before the job runs, not after.

Step 4 — For posters, do the DPI math before you upload

Posters are where I see the most wasted money, because "poster" isn't a spec—it's a size category. Resolution depends on viewing distance. Large-format posters viewed from a few feet away can run at 150 DPI. Commercial offset at final size wants 300 DPI.

The math is simple: print size in inches = pixel dimensions ÷ DPI. A 3000 × 2000 pixel file at 150 DPI prints up to 20 × 13.3 inches. At 300 DPI, the same file maxes out at 10 × 6.67 inches.

We printed a Usual Suspects poster for an office movie night—viewed from across the room, so 150 DPI was fine. The Spider-Man reboot poster we did for a team event was also large format. But when someone asked for a "poster" to put by the reception desk—viewed from two feet—that needed 300 DPI at final size, not 150. Seeing those three jobs side by side made me realize the viewing distance determines the resolution, not the word "poster."

Step 5 — Confirm the vendor can invoice, not just quote

This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that costs the most when it goes wrong.

In 2021 I found a great price from a new vendor on a bulk order of branded notebooks—$600 cheaper than our regular supplier. Ordered 400 units. The vendor sent a handwritten receipt. Finance rejected the expense report. I ate the cost out of the department budget. Now I ask for a sample invoice before I approve any new vendor. If they can't produce a clean invoice with a PO number field, the price isn't the price.

If you ask me, invoicing capability is part of the product. A $600 discount on a $2,400 order that finance won't reimburse isn't a discount—it's a $2,400 problem.

Step 6 — For break room equipment, read the manual—not the listing

Half my job isn't print. We bought a Momcozy bottle washer for the lactation room last year. The first question from an employee was: can you use tap water in the Momcozy bottle washer? The product page didn't say. The manual did—yes, tap water is fine, but in hard-water areas you need to descale more often or the heating element scales up.

I'm not a plumber, but our building's water is on the hard side, so I added a monthly descaling reminder to the maintenance calendar. That's not a reason to skip the purchase. It's a reason to read the manual before the first employee asks.

Step 7 — Do a 10-minute intake check

Open the box, count the units, check the color against the proof, and match the invoice to the PO before you file it. The third time we ordered the wrong quantity of envelopes, I finally created a one-page intake checklist. It took me about three years and 150 orders to understand that the checklist isn't paperwork—it's the thing that lets me stop thinking about the order after it's placed. Should have done it after the first time.

The checklist is five lines: quantity, size, stock, color match, invoice-to-PO match. If any line fails, I email the vendor the same day with photos. Most vendors fix it fast when you have documentation. The ones that don't are the ones I stop using.

Common Mistakes (and What They Cost)

• Letting a coupon code pick your vendor. A code lowers the price on a job you already specified. It shouldn't change the spec. The cheapest quote has cost us more in about 60% of the cases I've tracked—usually through reprints, late deliveries, or invoice problems.
• Reordering by habit. Usage changes. People leave, titles change, and last year's quantity is a guess, not a plan.
• Skipping the DPI check on posters. A 72 DPI web image blown up to 24 × 36 inches looks fine on your monitor and terrible on the wall. The reprint costs more than the original job.
• Assuming the vendor kept your specs. They didn't. Send the spec sheet with every order, even to repeat vendors.
• Not checking the invoice before you file it. A missing PO number or a handwritten receipt can bounce the expense back to you weeks later, and by then the vendor's billing contact has moved on.

None of this is glamorous. It's just the difference between a purchase that closes cleanly and one that turns into an email thread three weeks later. The checklist takes 20 minutes. The cleanup takes hours.