Hotel invoice & procurement glossary.
Plain-English definitions of the terms behind Atrium — what they mean, why they matter for hotels, and how they fit into reviewing invoices before payment.
Written for hotel operators, not for procurement departments.
Procurement has its own vocabulary. Nobody hands you the dictionary.
A price that crept up. A case that never arrived. A bill that came twice. Each one of those has a name, and knowing the name is what makes the problem findable.
Hotel purchasing and accounts payable run on words most people never had to learn. A general manager who has never run a purchasing function should not have to guess what a goods receipt note is, why a three-way match matters, or what somebody means by pack-size normalization.
These are the terms that come up the moment invoices get checked before payment. Each one is defined the way it shows up in a hotel — on a foodservice invoice, at the loading dock, in the folder where the linen agreement was filed and never opened again.
Read one when a word on an invoice does not make sense. Read a whole cluster when you are trying to understand the check itself. Every definition links onward to the page that covers the work.
What you will not find here
- No procurement theory.
- No consultant vocabulary.
- No definitions written for a corporate buying desk.
Every entry is written for the person who has to approve the invoice on Friday.
A few terms carry most of the weight.
If you read nothing else on this page, read these. Everything else in the glossary is a refinement of the check they describe.
3-way matching
The whole idea in one term. What was ordered, what arrived, and what is being billed should agree — and when they do not, that gap is worth reviewing before payment.
02Goods receipt (GRN)
The record of what actually came off the truck. Without it there is nothing to check an invoice against, which is why a short delivery can go unnoticed for months.
03Invoice exception
The output of the check. Price increases, short deliveries, and suspected duplicates all land here as a line a person decides on.
Grouped by where each term shows up.
The documents your hotel already has, the checks that compare them, and the places money quietly leaves. Start with whichever group the word you ran into belongs to.
The documents
What your team already creates or receives before anyone checks anything.
Goods receipt (GRN)
A goods receipt note (GRN) records what was actually delivered — the proof a hotel checks an invoice against before paying.
Invoice capture
Invoice capture turns supplier invoices — PDFs, scans, photos, and email attachments — into structured, line-item data a hotel can actually use.
Purchase order (PO)
A purchase order is the hotel's record of what it agreed to buy and at what price — the baseline every invoice should be checked against.
The checks
How those documents get compared, and what a mismatch is called when one turns up.
3-way matching
3-way matching compares the purchase order, the goods receipt, and the supplier invoice so a hotel only pays for what it ordered and actually received.
Billed but not received
Billed but not received means a supplier invoiced for more units than the hotel actually received — paying for goods that never arrived.
Invoice exception
An invoice exception is any supplier invoice that doesn't match what was ordered or received — a price change, short delivery, duplicate, or missing detail.
Pack-size normalization
Pack-size normalization converts case, box, and each pricing to a common per-unit basis so a hotel can compare prices fairly across suppliers.
Where money leaks
The names for what small, repeated invoice differences add up to over a year.
Contract leakage
Contract leakage is money lost when suppliers bill above the agreed contract rates and nobody checks the invoice against the agreement.
Spend leakage
Spend leakage is money a hotel loses to small, unnoticed invoice errors — price creep, duplicates, and short deliveries that add up over time.
Supplier pricing agreement
A supplier pricing agreement fixes what a supplier may charge a hotel — unit rates, effective dates, and price-increase caps for covered items.
See these terms on your own invoices.
Forward ten recent supplier invoices and Atrium returns a free Hotel Spend Leak Report — the price increases, the possible duplicates, and the lines worth a second look. No card, no commitment, nothing to install.